E-Textbooks: Home

Frazar Memorial Library is pleased to make available the Open Textbook Library, a collection of approximately 280 free online college textbooks on a wide range of academic subjects.  The textbooks have been written and reviewed for accuracy by faculty at various colleges and universities and are freely available to anyone to read and print.  Subjects include accounting and finance; business, management, and marketing; computer science and information systems; economics; engineering; foreign languages; general education; humanities and language; law; mathematics and statistics; natural and physical sciences; and social sciences.  Titles may be accessed by following the link above and through the library's catalog.  The Open Textbook Library is a project of the Open Textbook Network, with technical support statewide from LOUIS: The Louisiana Library Network.  No special login is required from off campus.

Access to the OTL is part of the Affordable Learning LOUISiana initiative, a partnership of LOUIS and the Louisiana Board of Regents with the goal of reducing student expenditures for required course materials.  Instructors are encouraged to seek out open educational resources (OER) and incorporate them into their classes whenever possible.  To this end, librarians from LOUIS libraries met in March 2017 to identify and map open textbooks and related free resources to the Louisiana Statewide Common Course Catalog.  The resulting list can be found here.  The search for appropriate OER is expected to be ongoing.  Suggestions for new materials may be sent to either Lonnie Beene or Walt Fontane (see right).

The tabs above give background on OER and information on their usefulness.  The following articles also answer common questions about OER.

• EDUCAUSE, "7 Things You Should Know about Open Educational Resources" [PDF]
• OER Africa, "Frequently Asked Questions on OER"