Creating a STEM Collection to House Higher Risk Standard Textbooks

It can be challenging to add standard textbooks in science and engineering disciplines to the library collection since many are only available in print format. When these texts are placed in the circulating collection, they are often stolen, hidden, or borrowed by other universities making them unavailable. When these texts are placed on reserve, they are protected like course textbooks but have low usage due to the short loan period. To combine these options, a new STEM Collection was created to house higher risk standard textbooks. Topics to be covered are why this new collection was needed based on statistics for lost and missing textbooks, how it functions including guidelines for identifying higher risk items, ways it is being promoted, and what worked and did not work during the pilot.