66407.6.
A postsecondary educational institution, as defined in Section 66407.5, is encouraged to provide a faculty textbook adoption search engine for purposes of discovery, evaluation, and selection of course materials that allows faculty or course coordinators to view, compare, and contrast textbooks and other course materials within a given subject area and to communicate their adoption choices to the appropriate procurement staff and colleagues.(a) A postsecondary educational institution that provides a faculty textbook adoption search engine shall do all of the following:
(1) Seek out a third-party entity that will create and implement the faculty textbook adoption search engine free of charge to the
postsecondary educational institution.
(2) Ensure that the faculty textbook adoption search engine includes all of the following:
(A) An automated warning system that provides faculty and course coordinators with information on both of the following:
(i) Textbook adoption deadlines and the potential costs to students stemming from late adoption.
(ii) Potential consequences related to textbook bundling and customization that may impact student buyback or resale options.
(B) The ability to produce reports that include, but are not limited to, a cost index by subject area, each faculty member’s place within the cost index, and the timeliness and average on-time rating for faculty adoption
submissions. Upon approval of the faculty, the reports may be accessible to department chairs, school administrators, and state officials.
(3) Ensure that the institutional bookstore, as defined in Section 66407.8, provides the course and adoption information pursuant to subdivision (a) in an open protocol, using either a comma delimited format, as defined in Section 66407.5, or an application programming interface format (API), that allows an outside organization or company full and free access to the information, including, but not limited to, the department, course names, course sections, teachers of the courses, and the title and ISBN, as defined in Section 66407.5, of each book or material required for each course.
(A) An institutional bookstore shall provide written instructions for an outside organization or company to access the course and adoption information and post the
instructions on the institutional bookstore’s Internet Web site.
(B) Information collected by the institutional bookstore shall be made available to other parties at the same time as provided to the bookstore and shall be posted on the bookstore premises or on the bookstore’s Internet Web site.
(b) A postsecondary educational institution that instituded a faculty textbook adoption search engine prior to January 1, 2013, is encouraged to comply with the requirements set forth in paragraphs (2) and (3) of subdivision (a).
(c) The following definitions apply to this section:
(1) “Application programming interface” or “API” means a type of data format that allows software components to communicate with each other.
(2) “Open protocol” means a standard way to exchange requests and responses that is publicly available and has various rights of use associated with it.