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W&M Libraries

Textbook affordability at W&M

Textbook affordability initiative

National surveys indicate that students are now spending about $1200 each year if they purchase all of the textbooks required for their classes. The increase in textbook prices has far outpaced the increase in inflation, nearly doubling from 1998-2008 alone, and going up over 1,000% since 1977.

Blind date with a book

With February officially behind us, we say good-bye to that infamous holiday of love--Valentine’s Day. This year the Libraries celebrated Valentine’s Day with an event universally known (among libraries anyway) as Blind Date with a Book.

Sustainable Collections: Spending Trends with Big Deal Publishers

Open laptop with an image of a closed padlock on the screen.

The collections budget of the university libraries is subject to enormous inflationary pressures for scholarly content.  This issue is of supreme importance to universities around the globe, with libraries in many countries working on strategies to provide greater access to information without monopolizing their entire budgets on a small number of for-profit journal publishers.  This year, we have worked with other universities in the state to analyze our own journal subscriptions, particularly those subscriptions which we have with the top academic publishers in the world.

I Belong

For four days, Tijeras Avenue and 2nd Street in downtown Albuquerque, New Mexico was immersed with people who worked in libraries, and most were people of color.