Penn State students could have the ability to buy and sell used books without the help of bookstores as soon as Thanksgiving.

This service will be made possible through the University Park Undergraduate Association's (UPUA) nearly completed online book exchange, which student programmer Ian Kellogg demonstrated to the UPUA assembly at Wednesday's meeting.

Ralph Crivello, chairman of the student assembly, and Matt Smith, academic affairs committee chairman, have been two of the main forces pushing the project forward since it was conceived in December 2007.

"Matt and myself were very pleased with this as a first version," Crivello said. "Usually it takes years to get something like that up and running."

The new program allows users to post books by their International Standard Book Number (ISBN) and specify at which campus it is being sold, the book's condition, a desired price and whether or not the price is negotiable.

All monetary exchanges take place offline because of liability issues associated with the book exchange being under the Penn State domain. Sellers can choose to use their phone number, e-mail address or both as contact information.

Currently, the book exchange is on course to be available to the university community sometime in November.

"It's a model on how things can proceed, and I give a lot of credit to [Information Technology] and a lot of credit to the academic affairs committee from last year for making things happen," Crivello said.

UPUA also voiced its concern regarding the recent removal of the Class of 1900 benches as the assembly passed a resolution stating the group's desire to be at least notified of future alterations to class gifts.

"I really wanted to stress that this wasn't criticizing the university for tearing up the benches, it's really about moving forward," said Sam Loewner, the off-campus representative who sponsored the resolution. "The idea is to have more communication between the Office of Annual Giving and UPUA. Their office and our assembly can disagree entirely, but at least someone knows about this and it's public."

While the legislation doesn't outline any concrete methods for the Office of Annual Giving to approve plans with UPUA, Jordan Ford, assistant director of the office of annual giving, said his office was open to collaborating with UPUA in the future.

Before the resolution was debated, Ford spoke to the assembly to shed light on the process his office and the Office of Physical Plant (OPP) had gone through prior to the benches' removal. He pointed out that while OPP removed nine benches, pieces of those are being consolidated into five showpiece benches that will continue to commemorate the Class of 1900.