Jessica Kirschner

Jessica Kirschner leads the library’s textbook affordability efforts. She supports the VCU community in its efforts to decrease student costs and increase student success through the use of affordable and open educational materials. Working with partners from across the VCU community, she advocates, educates, and assists in the creation of new resources and the location, adoption, and adaptation of existing course materials, from library materials to open educational resources. She also manages the Affordable Course Content Awards, a grant program providing funding and project support for faculty looking to transition to free course materials.

Before joining VCU Libraries, she served as the Digital Publishing Librarian at Texas Tech University, where she was developing an affordable, digital textbook publishing program. She began her career working in the acquisitions department at SUNY Press, before obtaining her MLIS from the University of Pittsburgh and working in their Office of Scholarly Communication and Publishing. She was a 2017 Society for Scholarly Publishing Fellow and received the Library Publishing Coalition Award for Exemplary Service in 2019.

Her academic interests focus on publishing and open education, especially the intersection of the two.