SCALE - For Librarians

Now Available: PASCAL Faculty Textbook Portal

We are excited to announce that the PASCAL Faculty Textbook Portal is now available to share with faculty on your campus. The Portal is designed to assist faculty in finding and selecting open and affordable course materials. Using EBSCO’s Faculty Select interface, the PASCAL Faculty Textbook Portal allows faculty to easily search and access quality Open Educational Resources (OER), over 400 PASCAL provided DRM-free e-books, EBSCO’s Open Access eBook Collection, and DRM-free e-books that faculty can request their library purchase.

While the Portal is available to all members, individual libraries may choose whether or not they want to make it available to faculty on their campus. Because the Portal contains e-books available for purchase, members should consider whether or not they wish to purchase e-books that faculty may request.

Please see below for details on providing access to the Portal and resources for promoting it to your faculty.  

About the PASCAL Faculty Textbook Portal

The PASCAL Faculty Textbook Portal, built on EBSCO's Faculty Select interface, is designed to assist faculty in finding and selecting open and affordable course materials. By leveraging free open materials and low-cost library-licensed resources, faculty can transform their courses and reduce the cost burden for students.

There is one interface for all PASCAL members, branded as the PASCAL Faculty Textbook Portal. Faculty will be required to indicate their institution, allowing their request to be sent to the Affordable Learning Contact at the appropriate institution. 

View the webinar for faculty recorded on November 2, 2023:

Please Note:

In troubleshooting issues with members, we discovered that the URL for the Faculty Textbook Portal originally provided by EBSCO was incorrect. The correct URL has been sent to all Affordable Learning Contacts and should be shared with faculty on your campus.

The PASCAL Faculty Textbook Portal Email Template (see Promotional Tools below) has been updated to provide the correct URL and a second template, PASCAL Faculty Textbook Portal Email Template: Notifying Faculty of Change in URL,  (see Promotional Tools below) has been provided that can be used if you previously contacted faculty about the portal and need to alert them to the change in URL.  

If faculty on your campus experience any problems when using the Faculty Textbook Portal, please submit a Help Desk Ticket.

Promotional Tools

Content included in Faculty Select includes:

• 24,000+ and growing OER Materials
  • BC Open Textbooks
  • Milne Open Textbooks
  • OAPEN
  • OpenStax
  • Open Textbook Library
• 7,000+ and growing Open Access EBSCO eBooks
• 280,000+ and growing Unlimited Use DRM-free eBooks
• Over 400 PASCAL Owned E-Books from the following collections:
  • ProQuest Social Science & EDI Collection
  • Oxford UPSO Psychology Collection

Additional Resources from EBSCO:

• EBSCO Faculty Select Promotion Kit
• EBSCO Faculty Select - Frequently Asked Questions

With Faculty Select, member libraries can:
 

Provide course materials that are no cost to students

• Help students spend less time worrying about the cost of course materials and more time using them.

Streamline access to quality OER

• Save time searching and collating materials from numerous Open Educational Resources (OER) platforms.

Enable faculty to search and request e-books

• Provide faculty with access to high-quality, library-licensed e-books to support course material.

Provide open and affordable textbooks

• Achieve library goals and meet institutional or state-level mandates surrounding textbook affordability.

Directly support course curricula

• Drive usage and value of your library materials. Promote the use of unlimited access, DRM-free e-books in courses.

Improve access to course content

• Simplify e-book access for students with no concurrent user or content restrictions (printing, saving or downloading).