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Course & Textbook Reserves for Graduate Students

The reserves service in the library is a means for materials required or recommended for use within a course may be placed on reserve for use by students enrolled in the specific academic course. The aim of the reserves service is to allow students easy access at a central location and to ensure all students within a course have the same opportunity for access to materials. For this reason, materials on reserve typically have shorter loan periods than other library materials to allow access to a high volume of library patrons (ex: One copy of an out-of-print title needed by several sections of students for an ENG 4413 course).  

Materials on reserve can be placed under two different branches, Course Reserve or Textbook Reserves. This is a designation usually stipulated by how the item was made available through the library, and for most students, there is no need to understand the distinctions as both branches operate the same way for student use.  

There are two ways to access titles on reserves:

  1. Students who can easily make the trip to campus can borrow the physical copy of the title for a designated window of time, usually 2 hours, for in library use only.
  2. Students who are not able to come to campus can request up to one chapter a day from a title to be scanned and sent as a PDF file through their student email. Note this limitation is a restriction for Copyright Law compliance. All chapter requests from the reserves must be submitted using this online form.

Textbook Reserves Program & Graduate Level Courses Open Close

The Textbook Reserve Program was not established to purchase graduate level materials. However, the library takes donations in the form of textbooks, which can be added to this reserves program. Some Graduate faculty and program departments have made these generous donations to help students within their courses. There are not many textbooks at the graduate level in the program, but if you are one of those students struggling to purchase the required material it may benefit you to use the Course Reserves tab on the library search tool to look up your course number and see if we have the required materials for your course.

Materials that cannot be added to the program:

  • Digital textbooks
  • Digital access Codes
  • Rent only textbooks