How to Find Open Textbooks at the University of Minnesota Library

Are you the head of a university library? Do you often struggle with the lack of textbooks available for faculty, students, and researchers at your university? Are you a faculty member, researcher, or student searching for textbooks to support your learning and research needs, but your library doesn't have what you need? This article will guide you on how to search for, choose, and filter open textbooks available at the University of Minnesota's library.

Select a book by topic directly on the homepage of the University of Minnesota Open Textbook Library. Currently, the collection of open textbooks at the University of Minnesota is not large, with around 400 books across 12 topics, including approximately 20 books available through OpenStax (see more: Find Open License Textbooks on OpenStax). The collection is expected to grow in the future. For now, you can easily choose a book by subject right from the homepage of the Open Textbook Library by clicking on the links to each subject and selecting books to view or download. As of early December 2016, the number of open license textbooks in each subject area is as follows:

• Accounting & Finance: 8 books.
• Business, Management & Marketing: 50 books.
• Computer Science & Information Systems: 36 books.
• Economics: 14 books.
• Engineering: 6 books.
• Foreign Languages: 8 books.
• General Education: 25 books. Notably, the book Teaching in a Digital Age by A.W. (Tony) Bates, University of British Columbia, Canada, is available in Vietnamese and can be downloaded directly from the author's website here.
• Humanities & Language: 68 books.
• Law: 42 books.
• Mathematics & Statistics: 63 books.
• Natural & Physical Sciences: 53 books.
• Social Sciences: 22 books.

• If you or your university library are interested in building an open textbook library, this is an excellent model to refer to. It covers various aspects, including the criteria for what makes a textbook open and the process of evaluating books for inclusion in the open textbook library.