The University Library and Mandatory literature

Policy

The University Library Policy is that students purchase their own required literature. The University Library offers titles from the list mandatory literature as an additional service.

With eBooks, it seems easy to purchase all mandatory literature as eBooks and offer access to all students. We would like to do so, but unfortunately often that is not possible. Purchasing eBooks for an academic library works very differently than purchasing eBooks as an individual. The price for an eBook you see listed on the Internet is the price for 1 person with 1 account. As a library, we depend on publishers or platforms that facilitate us to make a title available to multiple users at the same time - but only TiU students and staff - through the so-called campus license. For the library, it can be too expensive to purchase eBooks (up to thousands of dollars while a paper copy costs less than $50). It is also not possible to access eBooks from other university libraries, which may only grant access to their own students and staff. 

For more on this, see our blog posts on Ordering eBooks - not that simple, or Tips for ordering mandatory literature.

Nevertheless, we strive to make the mandatory literature available as an eBook whenever possible.

Shelving location

The library has put together the physical books mandatory literature of the different schools in the student bookshelves (SB books) at level 1 of the library. The books are identified in the catalog (WorldCat Discovery) by the signature ECO SB, SOC SB, JUR SB, LET SB, CIF SB and TFL SB. These books are not for loan. However, a second, short term loan copy for each book title is included in the regular collection. This copy can be borrowed for two weeks.