Check out the latest ebook subscription by the library. Books 24×7 provides many books and manuals on all topics related to computers. Need to learn about HTML? XML? CSS? How about if you just want a Dummies Guide to Word? Books 24×7 will help out.
Since new books are added to 24×7 all of the time, you will always find books that deal with the latest software or standard. Let us know what you think.
Check out the latest newsletter from the American Council of Learned Societies. This provides some information on new additions to their e-book package (available through the library’s catalog or the ACLS web site) and highlights some new titles.
As a follow up to my previous post about open access, I highlight the recent decision by a group of New England libraries to choose the Open Content Alliance as their partner in digitizing their book collections. This is a direct defeat for both Google and Microsoft, who were courting this library group for inclusion in their own, individual book digitization projects.
All of us who are interested in the broadest access and continued access to information applaud this decision. As the New York Times states, this decision
suggests that many in the academic and nonprofit world are intent on pursuing a vision of the Web as a global repository of knowledge that is free of business interests or restrictions.
Here are some links that you may find interesting:
Over the next month, I will be providing information about the new ebooks available through the library’s web site. All told, you will have access to over 35,000 books in electronic format.
While each of the services — ebrary and Humanities ebook Project — have web sites that you can use to search for titles, you will also find links to the ebooks in the Neil Hellman Library’s online catalog. Any time you do a search in the catalog, you will find information about our print book collection AND our ebook collection.
Now for the tip: there is a way to do a search in the catalog just for our ebooks. Here’s how…
1. Go to the library catalog at http://libdb.strose.edu and choose the advanced search tab. (You’ll see three tabs; Advanced Search is the middle tab.)
2. In the first search box, type electronic resource.
3. Type in other keywords in the other boxes (for example: teaching and math)
4. Click on the Search button. The results will all be ebooks.
The second new ebook service now available through the library is ebrary. Ebrary is a much larger collection than ACLS, and it includes books from all disciplines. With approximately 33,000 titles, ebrary provides access to recent books in education; history and humanities; life and physical sciences; social and behavioral sciences; business, marketing and economics; and computers and information technology.
There are a number of ways to access ebrary’s books:
Currently ebrary requires users to download and install a reader. They plan to unveil an alternative method shortly that will allow users to skip this step and simply read books via their web browsers. I’ve found that the ebrary reader is a nice product and has a number of useful features:
Ebrary also provides a number of good orientation tools. Check the list below for some suggestions about learning more about ebrary.
Important links
As of today, two new ebook services are available through The Neil Hellman Library. The first, ACLS Humanities eBooks, will be highlighted today. The second service, ebrary, will be discussed on Friday.
The American Council of Learned Societies has expanded its history ebook project to cover the humanities. As described on its web site, The Humanities ebook project
is a digital collection of over 1500 full-text titles offered by the ACLS in collaboration with twelve learned societies, nearly 90 contributing publishers, and librarians at the University of Michigan’s Scholarly Publishing Office. The result is an online, fully searchable collection of high-quality books in the Humanities, recommended and reviewed by scholars and featuring unlimited multi-user access and free, downloadable [catalog] records. HEB is available 24/7 on- and off-campus through standard web browsers.
Within the next month, bibliographic records for these 1,500 titles will be available and searchable in the library’s online catalog. Right now, however, users can access the HEB site, browse or search for titles, and read the books online.
Aside from the convenience of ebooks, their primary value to researchers lie in the ability to search for words or phrases in the text of all books simultaneously. While tables of contents and indexes are great tools, nothing beats the ability to take an instantaneous peek within the covers.
HEB is available right now for users. Please check it out and let me know what you think of this new resource.
Important links
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