Education Policy, Business and Technology

College textbook quarantine boosts safety, challenges accessibility

EdScoop: Santa Fe Community College has set up a quarantine protocol for its library textbooks to prevent COVID-19 from spreading. But taking books out of circulation for several days at a time has limited the accessibility of important class materials, and electronic textbooks haven’t been able to solve the problem entirely, the school’s librarian said.

Many students at Santa Fe Community College rely on the library to access textbooks they need for class, Valerie Nye, the school’s head librarian, told EdScoop. And although the Centers for Disease Control website states that “the virus is thought to spread mainly from person-to-person,” researchers investigating how long the COVID-19 virus survives on print materials recently suggested that schools quarantine textbooks for up to three days, prompting several colleges to find alternative ways give students access to textbooks.

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