FGCU Library staff have been busy looking at the list of textbooks for next semester and have prepared over 1500 course materials lists that correspond with courses on offer during the fall semester. The library covers over half of the fall 2024 textbooks with library-owned materials either in print or electronic format!
If you are a student, check and see if there are reading lists for courses you are taking (or are interested in taking). Your course textbook could be available for you to borrow or to view online at no cost to you!
If you are an instructor, check and see if we have already made you a course reading list. If there is a reading list for your course with library-owned materials in it, be sure to share with your students by activating your lists in your Canvas courses. You can easily add more books, videos, articles, and websites to any pre-made reading lists to make them your own. If you don’t have a pre-made list, you can always create one!
Course Reading Lists are available for any FGCU faculty member to create or edit. These course readings lists can be fully integrated into Canvas, making it easy for students to connect with course readings and resources. Course Reading Lists can be used to create low-cost or zero-cost courses using library resources or Open Education Resources (OER). See our complete guide to Course Reading Lists to learn about the possibilities.
How to Read a Library Created Course Materials List
The library creates online "reading lists" for courses each semester. We start those reading lists with required textbook information we get from the bookstore. If the library owns a print or electronic copy of the textbook, there will be a link or location information linked to that citation. If we do not own the textbook, only the title and ISBN information will appear, along with an indication that the book is available from the bookstore.
It’s been an exciting semester when it comes to ScholarsCommons, FGCU’s institutional repository (IR). After only a few short years, ScholarsCommons now connects users to over 9,000 research outputs created by the FGCU community with many more on the way!
How does ScholarsCommons benefit you, you might be asking. One of the major benefits of making your research more accessible is that the more people that see it, the greater the chances are of increasing your citations! This becomes an even greater possibility if your work is open access, which means that it can be read by users across the globe. Over the last few years, there has been compelling research showing that there’s a direct correlation between greater citation counts and open access (Huang, et al., 2024). If publishing open access is not an option available to you, there may be a solution in the form of green open access, a form of open access wherein most major journals, usually after a stipulated period of time, permit you to share a version of your submitted work in an institutional repository, just like ScholarsCommons!
If you would like any assistance with the determining how to turn any past or future scholarship into green open access, all you have to do is reach out to Research Systems & Applications Librarian Kaleena Rivera at krivera @ fgcu.edu. For more information on ScholarsCommons, including how to interact with your pre-made researcher profile, check out the user guide here!
References
Huang, CK., Neylon, C., Montgomery, L. et al. Open access research outputs receive more diverse citations. Scientometrics 129, 825–845 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-023-04894-0