









































Listen and Learn sessions  143

Course Materials for  
Uncertain Times
Balancing Purchase Formats in Multiple 
Learning Environments
Elizabeth R. Miller, Coordinator of Digital Initiatives, Pitts Theology Library
Caitlin Soma, Head of Acquisitions and Access Services, Pitts Theology Library

ABSTRACT Acquisitions and course reserves librarians have worked 
throughout the pandemic to provide course materials in a constantly chang-
ing learning environment. At the Candler School of Theology, student de-
mand for online courses has increased, and in response, faculty have im-
plemented more creative pedagogy. The library has, in turn, changed our 
service models throughout the past two years to continue promoting stu-
dent success. This article offers a look into course reserve collecting poli-
cies from 2019 to 2022 to show how changes in instructional methods have 
impacted everything from staffing needs to collection development. We 
will then discuss how our decision-making around electronic resource pur-
chasing has evolved and demonstrate how to update course reserve and 
collection development policies to serve a hybrid learning environment.

INTRODUCTION

Acquisitions and course reserves librarians worked throughout the 
pandemic to provide course materials in a constantly changing learn-
ing environment. At the Candler School of Theology, due to sudden 
campus space restrictions and student preferences, the demand for 
online courses has increased, and in response, faculty have imple-
mented more creative pedagogy. The library has, in turn, changed 
our service models throughout the past two years to continue pro-
moting student success.

We offer a look into course reserves collecting policies from 2019 
to 2022 to show how changes in instructional methods due to the 
COVID-19 pandemic have impacted everything from staffing needs 
to collection development. We will then discuss how our decision-



144  atLa 2022 ProCeedinGs

making around electronic resource purchasing has evolved and 
demonstrate how to update course reserve and collection develop-
ment policies to serve a hybrid learning environment.

FALL 2019

As of Fall 2019, a single librarian handed all acquisitions at Pitts 
Theology Library except for rare books and archival materials. This 
included managing all periodicals and electronic resources as well 
as conducting library assessments. To make this possible, 40 hours 
of student assistant work per week were allocated to the librarian in 
this position. Students assisted with receiving and processing new 
books and periodicals, preparing periodicals for binding, and cross-
checking new orders against the catalog. At this point, Pitts Library 
did not have a separate budget line for e-books. The Acquisitions, 
Serials, and Assessment Librarian managed database and e-package 
subscriptions, but there was neither a budget line nor a clear process 
for making firm-order e-book purchases. Because the vast majority 
of courses taught at Candler School of Theology required in-person 
attendance, we rarely needed to make firm-order purchases of elec-
tronic monographs. As part of our collecting, we purchased a copy of 
every book assigned for a Candler course. Many of these books were 
already in our collection, so buying a relatively small number of addi-
tional titles each semester was a simple way to support our students 
and keep our collection up to date with current course offerings.

Similarly, a single librarian handled all course reserves materials 
for the Candler School of Theology, including para-curricular pro-
grams like the United Methodist Course of Study. In addition to course 
reserves, the Reserves and Circulation Specialist spent roughly half 
of their time in the circulation department. Course reserves oper-
ate cyclically, requiring full-time attention for the first few weeks 
of each semester, and scaling back as the semester progresses. Be-
cause of the cyclical nature of course reserves, there was not enough 
year-round work to maintain a student worker. With no dedicated 
course reserves student assistant, we often cross-trained circulation 
students to assist with processing book pulls, scanning excerpts, and 
taking down reserves at the end of the semester. Course reserves 



Listen and Learn sessions  145

were primarily print copies of full books available for short-term 
checkout at the circulation desk with supplementary scans of book 
excerpts and links to electronic databases available in the electronic 
reserves system.

SPRING 2020

In March 2020, Emory University closed the campus after extend-
ing the spring break recess an extra week. All courses shifted fully 
online, and no one was allowed on campus without prior authoriza-
tion from administration. Librarians maintained basic patron ser-
vices by staffing the building four hours per day and supervising two 
graduate student assistants. While the building remained closed to 
patrons, staff created an outdoor drop-box circulation system and 
expanded document delivery services to all students, faculty, and 
staff to support ongoing coursework and research. Because the shift 
to fully remote learning happened in the middle of the semester, the 
university encouraged us to do whatever we needed to do to make 
course materials available to students for the remainder of the se-
mester. For Pitts, that meant working with faculty to determine what 
books were needed and purchasing all of them as e-books whenever 
possible. We pushed the copyright limits on scanning for course re-
serves, but we had university funds to devote to licensing permis-
sions for this extraordinary amount of scanned material.

2020-2021 ACADEMIC YEAR

With the pandemic in full swing, courses at Candler and most of 
Emory were fully online for the entire 2020-21 academic year. To 
support fully online courses, Access Services maintained our focus 
on e-books, online resources, and scanning. While the library space 
was open by reservation to current students, faculty, and staff, we 
did not offer physical course reserves or stacks access. Instead, we 
maintained intensive scanning and book request/retrieval services 
for all Emory community members. This shift led to a marked de-
crease in circulation services, giving us the opportunity to retrain 
our student staff to do scanning. Unlike Spring 2020, we were able 
to prepare for an academic year of fully online courses and could 
devote more intentional funding to e-books for course reserves.



146  atLa 2022 ProCeedinGs

FALL 2021

As students, faculty, and staff returned to campus for the Fall 2021 
semester, the library stacks reopened, circulation services resumed 
as usual, and physical course reserves returned to their place on 
the shelves behind the circulation desk. This was the first semester 
that Candler offered courses in such a wide variety of formats, in-
cluding fully online, fully in-person, hybrid, and hy-flex. At Candler, 
hybrid courses meet fully in-person for some sessions and meet re-
motely for the others, whereas hy-flex courses meet synchronously 
with some students always attending in-person and others always 
attending remotely. Because of our extensive electronic resource 
purchasing in the previous year, course reserves were populated 
with a huge number of e-books, scanned excerpts, and links to elec-
tronic databases of other resources. However, many of the materials 
faculty needed for their courses were not yet available as e-books, 
so we continued to scan and license permissions for book excerpts, 
which proved a financially unsustainable long-term solution for 
the university.

SPRING 2022

Due to a COVID variant outbreak over the winter recess, Emory 
postponed the Spring 2022 return to campus until January 31, 2022, 
shifting all courses online until that date. Candler’s entire January-
term session fell during that time, as well as the first few weeks of 
the regular spring semester, meaning the library now had to sup-
port fully online J-term courses with no lead time to prepare. Like 
Spring 2020, we attempted to purchase all the required texts as e-
books, but this time with little success because very few of the texts 
had library e-book licenses available. Unfortunately, the lack of e-
book options forced us to license more excerpt permissions for re-
serves use. However, the library remained open during the remote 
courses, so anything we were not able to license or purchase as an 
e-book, we could make available on physical reserves. For the regu-
lar semester, we scanned required readings for the initial remote 
period of the semester, but we did not attempt to buy e-book copies 
of all the texts since students would be back in person for the rest 
of the semester.



Listen and Learn sessions  147

SUMMER 2022 AND ONGOING

Now that things have mostly settled, our students have returned 
to their primary duties in acquisitions and circulation, no longer 
spending most of their time handling e-resources. We used this roll-
ercoaster time to formally adopt some collecting policies around 
course reserves, particularly around e-resources, and incorporated 
those into our long-term collection development plans. Throughout 
the pandemic, we experienced our first foray into providing course 
materials for fully remote courses and students, explored multiple 
new modes of course delivery, discovered the limits of copyright 
permissions purchasing and shifted student workers to entirely new 
duties. We have used these challenges as learning opportunities and 
have thus been able to inform ongoing discussions with administra-
tion and faculty about the library’s role in online learning.

SPENDING AND ELECTRONIC RESERVES

When the university campus closure in Spring 2020 required us to 
pivot to purchasing e-books for course reserves, we immediately in-
creased course reserves spending by 690% compared to Fall 2019. 
We had already added the textbooks for that semester to the print 
collection, but we now needed to buy everything possible in an elec-
tronic format as well. Since the shutdown occurred relatively late in 
the semester, we worked with faculty to determine which texts were 
most needed for the remainder of their courses. Between e-book li-
censing limitations and faculty whittling down their book lists, our 
huge spending increase only covered about 13% of the total books 
assigned for that semester. During the fall semester, we had more of 
an opportunity to work with faculty to assign books that were avail-
able electronically. As a result, our spending rose even higher with 
a 780% increase between Fall 2019 and Fall 2020. That became our 
peak for course reserves spending during the pandemic, as many of 
the textbooks needed for Spring 2021 had already been purchased 
during Spring 2020 and spending decreased accordingly. The fol-
lowing academic year, a partial return to campus allowed us to have 
physical course reserves again, but we still needed to support many 
online classes at the same time. At this point, our spending was de-
clining, but it remained 70% higher than an average semester prior 
to the pandemic. With the permanent addition of hybrid degree pro-



148  atLa 2022 ProCeedinGs

grams, we anticipate this increase to be permanent as well and do 
not expect spending to return to pre-pandemic levels.

The increase in e-book purchasing for online and hybrid courses 
is part of a larger trend towards electronic course reserves that has 
been taking place over the past several years. In 2016, only 60% of 
courses at Candler School of Theology were using electronic reserves. 
Instead, they relied primarily on physical reserve texts. However, 
by the 2020-2021 academic year, 95% of Candler courses were using 
electronic reserves. This includes not only e-books, but also scans of 
articles and chapters that professors assigned for classes. Electron-
ic reserves represent not only a huge increase in the cost of buying 
course reserve materials, but also a massive increase in the amount 
of work it takes to make materials available. Library staff must scan 
pages of book chapters to upload, while making sure that the por-
tions are within copyright limitations. E-books don’t require physical 
processing, but do require special cataloging, ongoing maintenance 
of proxy and sign-on systems, and additional reference support to 
ensure patrons can successfully access the e-books. Additionally, the 
Course Reserves Specialist must upload these items into the reserves 
system and Course Management System and field questions from 
faculty and students about the electronic content. Overall, although 
the implementation of electronic course reserves is popular and can 
be easier for many patrons than retrieving physical items from the 
library, it requires an enormous amount of work from staff across 
the library that cannot be overlooked.

STAFFING NEEDS

To best serve our purpose as an organization, we generally match 
our staffing to our mission statement, part of which is “to acquire, 
organize, preserve, interpret, and provide access to information 
resources.” Under normal operating conditions, staff work in all of 
those areas, fulfilling our obligations to our patrons and the broader 
academic and theological community. Once the building physically 
closed, we redistributed our staffing to meet the urgent needs of our 
community, most notably acquiring and providing access to materi-
als. Even departments not traditionally associated with access and 
acquisitions as such shifted their responsibilities to include one or 
both things. Access Services shifted traditional, in-person services to 
contactless circulation services and scanning for course reserves and 



Listen and Learn sessions  149

document delivery services, staffing the building, and supervising 
two graduate student workers. Cataloging provided critical support 
during this entire process, despite the explosion of e-book records 
to process, which was something with little precedent at Pitts. Refer-
ence librarians fielded countless questions about accessing electronic 
resources remotely and requesting items to be scanned or pulled for 
contactless circulation. Acquisitions temporarily suspended print or-
ders due to a lack of staffing to process the incoming materials, focus-
ing instead on electronic resources. At this point, we also decided to 
permanently include e-books in our acquisitions planning, indicating 
a major shift in our collection development. Of course, other projects 
in other areas of the library continued, but staff largely focused on 
the immediate needs of the Candler community for resource access. 
As the library reopened fully in Fall 2021, staff returned to their origi-
nal jobs in other areas of the library, and Access Services scaled back 
our services, though not to our pre-pandemic levels so far.

COLLECTION DEVELOPMENT

As we’ve worked through the pandemic and the various stages of 
distance education, our collection development policies and prac-
tices have developed to support a community of patrons with a 
higher need for e-book access. To support the purchase of electronic 
course reserves, we established a designated e-book budget line. This 
budget includes both course reserve and other monograph e-book 
purchases, but we have set policies around it to ensure that e-book 
spending fits within our larger acquisitions budget. During campus 
shutdowns, e-book purchases that duplicated our print holdings ac-
counted for 85 percent of e-book spending. This was necessary at the 
time because students were not permitted to come to the library to 
use our physical collections. However, since those restrictions were 
lifted, we have worked to limit duplicate purchasing to better stretch 
our collection budget.

With the move into significant e-book purchasing for the first time 
in our library’s history, we also needed to set policies around our e-
book licensing. Although it was tempting to simply buy everything 
available during those early days of the pandemic, we knew that it 
was important to pay attention to usability for our patrons as well as 
cost and availability. Years of library surveys, reference interactions, 
and help tickets have taught us that for many patrons, e-books cause 



150  atLa 2022 ProCeedinGs

deep frustration. They will use an e-book successfully one day but 
be turned away the next. Some e-books can be downloaded as PDFs, 
but others can’t, and it’s difficult for patrons to tell which is which. 
They will learn how to use one platform successfully, but then re-
alize that they need to access items on many different platforms to 
successfully complete their research. While libraries can’t solve all 
of these issues, we made a point of mitigating them as much as pos-
sible. To minimize turn-aways, we only purchase e-books with an 
unlimited user license. To assist with download issues, we purchase 
DRM-free licenses wherever possible. And to minimize user confu-
sion, we prioritize platforms that have consistently gotten positive 
feedback from our patrons. The unfortunate reality is that each of 
these policies causes e-books to cost more than they would other-
wise. However, our perspective is that it’s more important for the e-
books we buy to get a lot of use and to effectively meet the needs of 
patrons than to have a greater number of e-books that don’t get used 
and contribute to student burnout and library fatigue.

In addition to setting internal policies for e-book purchasing, we 
also needed to educate our patrons about e-books. Because course 
reserves are so closely tied to faculty syllabi, it’s important to clearly 
communicate the limitations and parameters under which we can 
buy e-books. This spring, librarians from Pitts presented at a fac-
ulty meeting to explain the different ways the library can support 
digital learning. A Reference Librarian taught about how scholars 
can manage their online presence using tools like ORCID, the Digital 
Scholarship Librarian provided examples of how to incorporate digi-
tal projects into classroom teaching, and the Acquisitions Librarian 
explained some of the limits of electronic resource purchasing. To 
accomplish this, we provided examples of e-books with different li-
censes and explained how the publisher limitations impact what the 
library can provide. We showed a book that is available for purchase 
electronically on Amazon Kindle but is not available for libraries. 
We also showed the dramatic price difference between a library e-
book and a print book, and examples of e-books that are exclusive to 
expensive database packages. Presenting these parameters helped 
explain why our collection development policies around purchasing 
e-books were in place and framed faculty as our allies in our ongo-
ing efforts to get students access to course reserves. Several faculty 
members expressed gratitude for our presentation and have been 
proactive in working with us to make resources more available for 



Listen and Learn sessions  151

their students. In one scenario, a faculty member was so committed 
to making her book available electronically through the library that 
she went to her publisher and worked with them to expand the li-
cense on the book to an unlimited user license. The publisher agreed 
to make the e-book available for purchase with an unlimited license, 
and we were able to purchase the e-book for her class to use.

As part of a large research university, it’s important that Pitts 
coordinate our collections with the other five libraries on campus. 
We’ve always worked with the other libraries to divide up relevant 
collecting areas, but the shift to digital learning during the pandemic 
made it even more important to closely examine which resources 
were being licensed and how they would be managed. Throughout 
this time, professors were experimenting with different teaching 
techniques and working to diversify the formats of resources needed 
for their classes. Many professors wanted to use streaming videos in 
their courses but obtaining streaming rights can be extremely dif-
ficult. For these requests, we relied on the licensing coordinator at 
the Woodruff library at Emory to negotiate licenses that could work 
for online courses. Additionally, we needed to coordinate the scope 
of databases that we licensed. Some online databases at Emory are 
only licensed for users in a specific graduate school due to their high 
cost per user. We try to license resources for the entire campus as 
much as possible but must stay aware of budget limitations and bal-
ance that with the overall needs of our patrons. There is not a single 
simple solution, but being intentional about keeping lines of commu-
nication open between libraries has allowed us to work across the 
university to make as many online resources available as possible.

MOVING FORWARD

In January of 2022, Emory University announced that it would start 
the semester remotely due to a surge in COVID-19 cases. Library staff 
returned from the holiday break on the same day as the semester 
started, providing little to no lead time to prepare resources. Addi-
tionally, the first week of the semester was Candler’s January term, 
which is an abbreviated academic term of intensive courses. With 
January term classes starting the same day library staff returned 
to work and lasting for less than a week, even e-book purchases 
wouldn’t be available quickly enough for these students to use them 
for class. The challenge was further compounded by the types of ma-



152  atLa 2022 ProCeedinGs

terials that are typically assigned for January term courses. Many 
of these materials, as well as materials for comparable summer and 
August term courses, are on niche topics, from small publishers, or 
are mass-market popular works. The nature of this content is such 
that it is far less likely to be available for libraries to purchase as e-
books than standard academic works. Because of these limitations, 
we were largely unsuccessful in providing course reserve e-books 
for students during this period. However, this provided us with an 
opportunity to demonstrate how our new policies for collecting 
worked and further highlighted the enormous amount of advance 
work required to make online learning successful.

As we’ve moved into an era of hybrid learning, we’ve been faced 
with equivalent staff in reserves and acquisitions with many addi-
tional responsibilities. As described previously, electronic reserves 
require a lot of extra work, and maintaining robust collections of 
both print and electronic reserves each semester is no small feat. To 
help manage this, our student staff roles have shifted. Now, acquisi-
tions students assist in checking proxy access for newly purchased 
e-books, and there is a designated course reserves student to assist 
with scanning book chapters. In addition to more help from student 
assistants, we have been intentional about setting accurate expec-
tations regarding course reserves at the library. We have created 
consistent policies for purchasing course materials based on the 
delivery of the course. Since hybrid courses require some in-person 
attendance, we consider them in-person courses for the purposes 
of reserves, acquisitions, and placement on physical reserve. For 
fully online courses, we purchase as many things electronically as 
possible. Hy-flex courses are treated as fully online courses because 
some portion of the students enrolled are remote and may not be 
able to travel to access materials on campus. We have continued to 
communicate with faculty about how the course reserves process 
works so that they can try to assign texts that we can easily make 
available for them. We have also worked with the admissions depart-
ment to make sure that incoming students are fully aware of what 
the library can provide for the upcoming classes. It’s important for 
both scholarship and personal budgeting that students arrive at the 
school with an accurate understanding of what books they will and 
will not be responsible for purchasing. Finally, we have worked on 
rolling back policies put in place early in the pandemic that are no 
longer sustainable long term. We no longer offer request and re-



Listen and Learn sessions  153

trieval services, for example, and we have limited scanning to only 
those items necessary for course reserves.

ONGOING QUESTIONS

We were successfully able to provide course reserves resources to 
our students throughout the pandemic due to a combination of quick 
action, devoted staff, expanded budgets, and collaborative faculty. 
However, there are still outstanding questions to which we do not 
have answers. What would we have done if staff were not permit-
ted in the library space to access physical books and scanners? If an 
e-book isn’t available and we can’t license a scan, is it possible to get 
students access to the book electronically at all? How can we find 
creative ways to keep expanding student access to course materi-
als? As we continue to work in an evolving hybrid educational land-
scape, we will continue to think through these questions and expect 
to encounter many more. Through uncertainty, it is important for us 
to look back on times like this when we needed to use every tool at 
our disposal to keep maintaining the mission of our library. By using 
past experiences to inform our practices, we can continue exploring 
creative ways to help theology students succeed.


