Faculty: Library Resources & Services

eBook Options 

Bastyr Library has a collection of 1000 medical textbooks in eBook format.  Look at your existing resources - are there digital alternatives? Look at the library ebook collection to add eTextbook chapters and multimedia resources to your classes:

• Access Medicine
• Clinical Key - Instructions for creating durable links for textbooks in ClinicalKey. 

Remember that when adding eBooks to your courses, you don't have to commit to the whole textbook, you can pull in chapters from a variety of textbooks so you aren't asking students to buy multiple books!

What if the eBook you want to assign is not in Access Medicine or Clinical Key?

The library is unable to license textbooks for multiple users outside of those available in Clinical Key and Access Medicine - however, if you find an eBook that is perfect for your class and want to assign it as a required text, you can do so with the expectation that students should acquire their own copy. Again, remember that eBooks are generally cheaper than a physical textbook and can often be "rented" from the publisher for a relatively low cost. 

If you find an individual eBook in the library catalog that you want to use in a class, remember that the license will not allow multiple users to access multiple times throughout the quarter.  If you only plan to use excerpts from the eBook, that should be fine - you can also embed digital excerpts (per Fair Use) in your Canvas course - please ask the librarians if you have more questions about how to do this.

Open Access, Open Educational Resources and temporary free access

Open Access resources are resources that are made freely available for use.  The Open Access movement has been gaining ground and is seeking to break down barriers to information.  In the case of scholarly publishing, Open Access is particularly focused on providing free access to scholarship that has been publicly funded. Several funding bodies now have made it a condition of the funding that any publications from the research will be made available.

Open Educational Resources are materials created for educational purposes that are available for use and reuse in the public domain, or under a Creative Commons License.

In response to the Covid-19 social distancing, several publishers are providing temporary free access to their resources.  We will post links to these resources here, but please note the limited timeframe and the conditions that each publisher is putting on usage - the library will not be able to license any services that you choose to use once the free access period is over.

Note: many "free trial" options are not available for everyone, common restrictions that have applied to Bastyr include restrictions to Medical Schools only, or to semester based schools.

Open Access Textbooks

General OER