COMBO results show need to put more textbooks on reserve

Committee on Background and Opportunity (COMBO) survey

“The COMBO survey showed that students who came from lower socioeconomic backgrounds were far less likely to buy needed course materials,” former USG president Rob Biederman ’08, who oversaw the survey’s implementation, said in an interview.

“The students on the committee and I thought the current number of books on reserve for classes were not nearly sufficient to accommodate students who needed the textbooks,” Biederman explained.

The survey, completed by 30 percent of undergraduates last May, sought to determine the effects of socioeconomic issues on student life on campus. Biederman presented the results at a meeting of the Council of the Princeton University Community last month.

Biederman has been working closely with Dean of the College Nancy Malkiel to implement COMBO’s recommendations, including the one urging increased course reserves. He said he expects changes to be made to classes across the board by this fall.

“The COMBO recommendations are very thoughtful and certainly deserve serious consideration,” Malkiel said. “You can be sure that we will be taking the recommendations seriously.”

She added that she cannot say with certainty at this time when the textbook recommendations will be implemented.

Firestone Library circulation services director Trevor Dawes said that Firestone reserves are able to accommodate all course materials, but that the decision to make use of such services is left up to each course’s professor. Though Firestone is able to put numerous copies of a course’s Pequods on reserve, professors generally request that only one copy be placed on reserve for each course, Dawes noted.

If a professor does not specify the number of copies they would like placed on reserve, the library determines the quantity based on the number of students enrolled in the class, Dawes explained.

Students frequently turn to Firestone’s reserves, Dawes said. “Our statistics demonstrate that these books are used.”

He said that in the last academic year, 17,000 items were checked out from the reserve desk. He added that this statistic only represents the operations of Firestone’s reserve desk, so the number of items checked out is most likely larger, as the University’s other libraries also have reserve collections.

COMBO’s recommendation calls for the University to purchase 15 to 20 copies of the course materials for a class the size of ECO 100: Introduction to Microeconomics, which had 265 students enrolled this semester, according to the Blackboard website.

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In addition to encouraging professors to make it known to students that these books are on reserve, the recommendations regarding textbook use call for professors to offer students alternatives to purchasing Pequod packets, such as posting materials through Blackboard, JSTOR or other electronic media.

Dawes is confident in the library’s ability to provide these online materials.

“We have a robust electronic reserve service where we will make available electronically, within copyright guidelines, readings that faculty members have requested,” he said.