In my last post about the availability of the 2010 Springer E-Book collection, I outlined some of the advantages of e-books over the print — 24/7 multi-user access, support for distance users, powerful and granular searching, suitability for reserve, and more.
To expand our e-book offerings, we’ve now leased access to a core collection of over 50,000 e-books from the past several years — a collection called Academic Complete and hosted on the ebrary e-book site. We’re providing this collection on a trial basis this year to see how well the titles are used and to gather feedback from you.
The Academic Complete collection is multidisciplinary, covering a variety of subject areas in the humanities, social sciences, business, medicine, and science, and offers a large number of titles from leading academic publishers. Over half of the collection dates from 2004 and later. Special features include:
* Powerful searching across all of the e-books or all e-books in specific discipline areas
* Complete full-text searching, including indexes and tables of contents
* Ability to navigate directly to your highlighted search results within a title
* Ability to browse through a book, or to navigate via the table of contents or index
* Ability to browse titles by discipline and drill down to specific subject areas
* Automatic generation of citations and persistent links to titles, chapters, and individual pages
* Ability to add highlighting and notes to text and save in your personal online bookshelf
* Convenient printing and copying
* Easy export of information to EndNote or RefWorks citation managers
* Text-to-speech and other accessibility features
You can go directly to the ebrary site to search or browse this collection. You’ll also find the individual titles listed in NuCat. By the way, on the main search or advanced search screens in NuCat, did you know that you can now limit searches to e-books only? Instead of “View Entire Collection,” simply select “Ebooks.”
I hope you enjoy using our new e-book collection. Your comments are welcome and important to us; you can comment on this post, contact your subject librarian, or you can reach me any time at a.aaron@neu.edu.