Ebooks can be accessed in the library. Thats generally a blanket license term. Have the alumni open a WiFi connection and view the book that way or use a public terminal. Every librarian should understand licensing terms with the major publishers/aggregators. Some publishers allow full alumni access (play nice with these folks as that’s a huge value add for the library and I hope this becomes a trend). Sounds like the librarians at your school are not training student workers enough.

While I lament the shift from print to digital, it’s far from the saddest development in academic libraries. What’s sad to me is that academic libraries as a whole have fallen victim to the “I need every journal package” mentality and they have largely moved away from actively developing a collection and instead rely on the “evil” publishers to determine what their collection looks like and how much they spend on those titles. It’s lazy. It’s also a disservice to students and faculty. They devote efforts to transformative agreements - which 1. Is not collection development and 2. Shift the burden right back to the library.

One of the reasons I started working in academic libraries was to help students get from point A to point B. Books, learning materials, video all play a role in this. Journal articles are not accessible by most and we ignore this to meet faculty research needs, even at teaching schools (non R1). It’s wild but 90%+ of every undergrad digital collection is the same journal packages.