Coming winter 2021: Library single point of fulfillment for digital course packs & electronic course reserves

In order to make course materials more affordable for students and to streamline the course pack creation process for faculty and instructors, McGill University has transferred responsibility for all course readings to the McGill Library. As of January 2021, the McGill Library will be the single point of access for course-related materials including digital course packs. This will allow the Library to provide students with access to course material through the Library’s collection or by licensing the work for use by classes at no additional cost to the student.

As part of this transition, the Library is combining the course packs service with our electronic course reserves program, under the new name Course Readings Service. This sustainable approach will offer the greatest flexibility for McGill students, wherever they are located for the winter semester. Students may print the electronic readings if they prefer to work from paper.

Readings from both course pack requests and course reserves requests that are part of the Library’s electronic collection will be available to students through the Course Reserves system. Materials that cannot be added to the Library’s collection will be licensed (if appropriate) for use by the requested course and provided to instructors as a PDF to post in MyCourses.

Instructors may request Course Readings (both course packs and course reserves) using this request form.

Please note that due to the commercial nature of textbook publishing, the Library is not typically able to obtain even part of textbooks for electronic access for students.

Questions? Please feel free to chat, email or text a librarian or send feedback.