t’s a story familiar to many college students: It’s the start of the quarter and the hassle of purchasing textbooks looms. Since, according to the EWU Financial Aid and Scholarships Office website, student financial aid isn’t posted until the first day of the quarter or after, students dependent on this aid are stuck with some unattractive choices.

Students can either buy textbooks at high markups at the campus bookstore or order them online through a third party at a cheaper price and forebear the two or three week shipping backup that inevitably ensues. Many students can’t afford the bookstore markups and even those who can prefer to go for the cheapest option available.

The easiest solution is indeed the most obvious: The library should have these books. Libraries exist to provide resources and at the beginning of the quarter, the inevitable backlogs of textbook orders even from the campus bookstore strands many students for weeks without their books. Even if the library only stocked the textbooks for the first few weeks or so on loan from other institutions, it would be a better solution.

Without their books, students can’t complete vital assignments, professors become frustrated and there is usually a mad dash to borrow the book from the few fortunate souls in the class who have it already. Generally, the campus bookstore bears the brunt of public criticism, with many students complaining the bookstore does not stock enough copies of textbooks, the markups are too high and so on. While these critiques are valid, there’s an easier solution that doesn’t involve a major overhaul of EWU’s textbook system: the library course reserves.

It’s a beautifully simple concept: The professor can either submit their own material or request the library get course materials, and they are placed on reserve at the circulation desk. According to the EWU website, course reserve materials can be checked out for periods of hours, days or weeks by students.

It seems to be the obvious solution. If the library can easily locate copies of the required texts and place them on reserve, students who rely on financial aid money to buy textbooks can make use of these backup copies while waiting for their books to arrive. These backup copies can serve as a safety net if, for instance, students’ textbooks get sent to the wrong address, get charged to the wrong card or get holed up in a massive backorder.

With the materials on course reserve, students are no longer in dire straits, as they can go to the library and check out the required text for an hour or so. The material never leaves the library and the students are no longer stranded without access to their textbooks. Ideally, this solution would enable students, especially those who rely on financial aid, to have the greatest success in the crucial early weeks of a new quarter while also being the most fiscally responsible.

However, while the library already has a course reserve system in place, it does not require that professors put copies of their textbooks on reserve. Instead, the library mostly relies on the professors to provide the copies from their own personal libraries. The instructor editions of these textbooks can already be quite an investment, making the possibility of purchasing extra student editions slim. Thus, the course reserves take up only a measly two half-shelves behind the circulation desk.

It is already absurd that the library of a university does not have readily available the texts it requires its students to have, and it is even more absurd that this same library does not require professors to place copies of these texts on reserve. Expecting instructors to fulfill this need out of their own personal belongings is possibly the most absurd of all.

It goes without saying that the library should have copies of all of the textbooks being used on campus. Furthermore, the burden of providing these resources should not lay on the instructors, but upon the library, as it exists to provide academic resources. The greatest function of the library is to serve as a resource to students and, arguably, the most important resource a university student can have is their textbooks.