Course Materials

Our Libraries offer services and tools that help instructors deliver and students access course materials. Physical course reserves provide copies of course-assigned textbooks, DVDs, and various resources available for check-out in the library, while our eTextbook program identifies no-cost eBooks and electronic resources assigned as course materials.

How to use Course Materials at the Library

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With the FSU Libraries Course Reserve program, course instructors can place course related library-owned or instructor-owned physical materials on Course Reserve so students in their classes can freely check them out for short periods of time while in the library. We are also able to place electronic materials such as eBooks, streaming videos, chapter scans, and scans of academic articles on eReserve so students are able to easily access them via the Canvas site. If you are an instructor, please visit the Course Reserve page to find more information about how to place a Course Reserve request.

Students, use the Course Reserve Search to identify available course materials. You may search by course code, instructor, or title of the book to find available materials for a specific course or for a specific title. If you don’t see your course materials listed, reach out to your instructor to see if they could put any material on Reserve.

Reserve books are checked out for 2 hours at a time; reserve DVDs are checked out for 4 hours at a time. To ensure that Reserve materials are readily available, only 2 Reserve items may be checked out at a time.

Any Course Reserve checked out longer than the 2-hour or 4-hour limit has an hourly charge of $3, with a max fine of $30. Any Course Reserve that is late by 24 hours or more will be charged in full to the person who checked it out. Please reach out to Fines Management or visit our General Materials Fines FAQ with any questions.

Instructor Information

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Course instructors can place physical FSU Library books and media materials and/or materials from their personal collection on course reserve so that students in their classes can freely check them out for short periods of time while in the library. We are also able to place electronic materials, such as eBooks, streaming videos, and scans of academic articles, on eReserve so students are able to easily access them via your Canvas site. To learn more about our course reserve services, please see:

eTextbooks

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Library-licensed material expands the amount of materials available for higher-level coursework and complements other OER materials. Many faculty at FSU have opted to adopt e-books, journal articles, videos, images, and other digital resources from our collection. Our eTextbook Search allows search by book title, instructor’s last name, or course code to see if your text is available as an eBook purchased by the Libraries. To learn more about our eTextbooks Program, please see:

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There are a number of important factors to consider when attempting to avoid copyright infringement while using copyrighted materials in the classroom Please visit our Copyright Resources research guide to learn more about the basics of using copyrighted materials in teaching, the Technology, Education and Copyright Harmonization Act, whether copyrighted content usage falls under Fair Use, and Creative Commons licensing. For more information on copyright, please see: