Let's say I wanted to find out what textbooks are being used in stanford graduate finance degree or something like that. How can I go about finding that out.
Consider searching .edu sites for syllabi - every syllabus I have ever received had the required textbooks on it.
You could also try searching for ISBN's on university domains, but I imagine this will be less consistent.
My university partnered with Barnes and Noble and published a list of required books per course as a bundle option. If a course catalog is available you can further refine your search based on course numbers (like FIN 4401 or CSE 4096, etc). Look for any partnerships a university has with a bookseller.
With the increased use of closed Web portals, whether bespoke (or more likely, OEM rebranded), or third-party, access to basic course information is increasingly difficult, often hitting a password-protected registration wall.
Emailing faculty or departments directly may offer (occasional) success, as can tracking down reader lists at campus bookstore websites.
There seems to have been a brief golden decade of roughly 2002--2012 when handcrafted professor homepages included course lists and syllabi at least at major universities, both public and private. It's grown markedly worse in recent years.
Open Courseware, under that name frequently, is an exception. M.I.T., Harvard, Stanford, and Cal Berkeley, off the top of my head. CUNY and Columbia likely as well.
For most universities, find the general catalogue or equivalent, which will list courses, often major / graduate requirements by department, course numbers, offer dates, and frequently, teaching faculty.
Plugging in course numbers, restricted to domain, and keywords "syllabus", "assigned reading", or similar, often works. I'm not above emailing faculty or departments directly.
Readings, especialy in graduate courses, often comprise of articles rather than standard texts. For these, a course-specific reference (syllabus) is often necessary.
My technique: most have bookstore integrations. Use their bookstore website by plugging in each course code and it should spit out the corresponding books when applicable.
I think this is the way to go. The only central database where I officially put my textbook choices on record is the bookstore order. The department collects syllabi, but they aren't centralized beyond that, and they make no effort to standardize the format.
If you are interested in just a small number of courses just Googling it will surely tell you what the book is. But for a school-wide list the bookstore is probably the only option.
There's no way to get the raw data from this site, is there? I have long been interested in doing some analysis of how syllabi have changed over time, but that doesn't seem possible with this interface.
unless im missing how to use this site, it doesn't work.. click stanford and it only lets you click computer science or literature all other subjects are greyed out
Regarding the OP's specific question, I actually had the a similar thought a few months ago and tracked down the book used in Andrew Lo's finance class at MIT Sloan (via OpenCourseWare). It's the "standard" investments textbook by Bodie, Kane, and Marcus.
For Stanford, you can start here: https://explorecourses.stanford.edu/.This should give you enough information about the various classes and their professors/lecturers. From there you can try searching for the course numbers on google. Most will have a website that hosts most of the material you may be interested in.
You can try looking at a Staff directory for each department. They usually have the professor's photo, contact information, and maybe a link to their professorial website.
You could also try searching for ISBN's on university domains, but I imagine this will be less consistent.
My university partnered with Barnes and Noble and published a list of required books per course as a bundle option. If a course catalog is available you can further refine your search based on course numbers (like FIN 4401 or CSE 4096, etc). Look for any partnerships a university has with a bookseller.
Those are some thoughts... good luck!