E-Books Have Arrived

E-Books Have Arrived!

Memphis University School

Hyde Library Learning Center

Set up Account | View E-books | MLA Citations | Other E-Book Collections

SETTING UP A NETLIBRARY ACCOUNT (to top)

Students and faculty can start accounts from school computers only; then log in from off campus
Not needed for searching, viewing, or printing if on MUS computer
Needed for checking out, taking notes, and compiling lists of books
To create your account, click HERE and when netLibrary opens, click "Create a Free Account" in the upper right-hand corner

HOW TO SEARCH

through the library's Online Catalog
directly through www.netLibrary.com; search by full text, keyword, title, author, and/or subject; and search through the whole database at once or for specific words within a single book. Searches can also be limited by publication date, publisher, language, or ISBN.
to see netLibrary's own online demo, click here

HOW TO VIEW AN E-BOOK (to top)

When you click on an e-book to view it, it will not be available to any other user in the Southeastern network until you close it.
The Checkout feature has been discontinued. You can still view the book in 15-minute increments, as long as no one else needs the book.
Please be sure to close any e-books that you are not using; click on "Close" inside the book.
netLibrary will log you out after 20 minutes of non-use.

TWO TYPES OF E-BOOK INTERFACES

HTML files. These are easy to work with. Search results are highlighted in yellow, and the embedded dictionary works intuitively with right- and double-clicking.
PDF files through Acrobat Reader. The full-text searching of these books works differently; the word(s) in question aren't highlighted. Instead, to pinpoint the word you're looking for, you have to right-click on a page or fill in the "Find" box in the Acrobat toolbar and hit <enter>. Highlighting a term and right clicking will give you an option to look it up, but you can also type the word in under the Dictionary tab on the left.

PROBLEMS YOU MAY ENCOUNTER WITH NETLIBRARY

Searching errors are discovered occasionally. (Please report problems to a librarian; always check the table of contents and index to make sure you find what's there.)
Like many other databases, netLibrary is still in development, and changes to the interface do occur.

VALUE:

adds thousands of titles to our collection, with the same rights of ownership as print books
comparatively low cost
no additional shelves or storage facilities
no additional hardware or software.
no re-shelving, no lost, stolen, or overdue books
local tracking of usage through the Library Resource Center
free cataloging imported into our online catalog

CHOICE OF MATERIALS:

currency--most still under copyright and licensed by the publisher
authority
research value
enduring value--some public domain available too
supports a broad community of users: academic, public, K-12, and special libraries, as understood by the groundbreaking library services company, OCLC

TYPES OF USE:

Not intended for printing out whole books; copyright warning
Users keep books open an average of 5-20 minutes for research purposes
Most users don't need to read whole book (can pay extra to be able to download whole books)
Searchable by keyword; can print sections & take notes
Have embedded dictionaries & can double click on a word for the definition (if HTML) or type it into the dictionary on left (if PDF)

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GALE VIRTUAL REFERENCE LIBRARY

MUS recently added several reference sets to our e-book collection. They're available through our Thomson Gale collection of databases and are also listed in our online catalog. The titles deal with leadership, history, literature, economics, science, and business. They can be searched by keyword, and our users have unlimited access on campus; use the standard MUS username and password for off-campus access.

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OTHER E-BOOK COLLECTIONS ON THE WEB (to top)

These are collections of books that are in the public domain and that someone, somewhere, has chosen to digitize. Most are public domain (not copyrighted) because they're older books and the copyright has expired.

Digital Book Index This site attempts to provide access to most of the electronic texts available on the Internet. It includes over 80,000 texts on commercial and non-commercial sites. Like Project Gutenberg below, this site is manned by volunteers. You can search by author, title, keyword, or subject, and it contains four browse indexes, including subject, author, publisher and a "Browse netLibrary by Dewey" index. I had to log in before I could search, but there was no charge. I tried an author/title search on Twain and Huckleberry, and found eight different versions; however, when I clicked on Gutenberg's chapters 1-5, I found instead "A Trip to Manitoba" by Mary Agnes FitzGibbon. Then, when I tried to download chapter 16-20, I was going to have to install WinZip on my school computer. So instead I chose the last version on the list--an HTML version from the University of Virginia, and it gave me easy access to one of the early editions, with illustrations. The browse indexes worked, but the links to netLibrary did not indicate which netLibrary collection the book belonged to (most weren't in our netLibrary III), and there was always an intermediate link to click on. Why not just do a Google search instead of looking here? This is more direct, indexes collections specifically, and won't throw out red herrings.

Project Gutenberg "Project Gutenberg is the first and largest single collection of free electronic books.... Michael Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg, invented eBooks in 1971 and continues to inspire the creation of eBooks and related technologies today.... The Project Gutenberg Philosophy is to make information, books and other materials available to the general public in forms a vast majority of the computers, programs and people can easily read, use, quote, and search." For this reason they use plain text or "Plain Vanilla ASCII," which is readable on virtually any computer. This allows documents to be printed easily. I had no problem getting to Huckleberry Finn directly through Project Gutenberg. It has a more bare-bones look, but it's reliable and contains a huge number of texts.

Bibliomania From the homepage, I pointed at the word "Read" and saw a link to the novel Erewhon by Samuel Butler. I clicked on that and got the table of contents and then the actual text. But when I clicked on "Search," I got an error message and a request to e-mail the webmaster with a copy of the screen. I also got the same problem when I clicked on "Search" and entered "Erewhon" from the homepage. I decided to check back to see if it was working correctly in a couple of days. When I checked back and entered "Erewhon" under "Search" from the homepage, I got a book entitled Soule's Synonymes. In addition, the back button sometimes failed to work.

Bartleby You can browse and read books (non-fiction, fiction, poetry, and reference) page by page on the screen. As a new option, it appears that Bartleby.com has partnered with Amazon.com to provide a service where books such as those in The Harvard Classics Shelf of Fiction can be downloaded as a PDF file by clicking on "download free e-books" at the bottom of the page. Then it appears that you can print the entire book. (I tried printing a sample and it printed everything I asked for.) I wouldn't bother with paying the $1.00 "honor system" fee for a public domain book. When I tried to see how that system worked, it led me through a long series of pages where I would have had to use a credit card. I did discover that anyone can add a "Click-to-Pay" button like this on his or her own webpage and ask for donations. Amazon will keep 5% plus $0.19 per transaction, and it seems like an easy way for entrepreneurial web authors to supplement their income. For information on the history of Bartleby.com, click on "Welcome."

Internet Public Library's List of Online Texts This list is just one small part of a website maintained by the University of Michigan's School of Information. It includes links to smaller projects, such as the complete works of Shakespeare and the Victorian Women Writers Project, as well as the sites above. Also includes folklore, classics, poetry, early journals, and a UNESCO directory of digitized collections. Explore the larger website to see how they organize online information.

The Literature Network Beware--(the link is intentionally inactive!)--through a Google search, I discovered this website, which supposedly combines searchable literary texts (I tried searching with mixed results) with a plagiarism mill. What a novel idea! It's published by "Jalic LLC" and author biographies are written by one Sindhu Menon. I'm wondering if a spyware attack on my computer came from this site or some of its links. Educators need to know about this and other mills. If you want to risk it, the URL is: http://online-literature.com.

Google Book Search Google is developing a collection of ebooks held by research libraries such as Harvard and the New York Public Library, and so far it has quite a few public domain books in their entirety; copyrighted books contain only short selections. The Scarlet Letter, for example, is available in full text. The Leatherstocking Tales is only available as a "limited preview" even though it's been in the public domain for a couple of hundred years. There are links on all the results pages to publishers and to Amazon.com, so this appears to be another commercial venture. Google says it's not intending to replace other digitization efforts and hopes it "will attract needed attention to digital library initiatives worldwide." To look for a book, enter the word book and the title in the Google search box, or go to http://books.google.com/. And try the Digital Book Index described above for a better list.

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MLA CITATIONS FOR E-BOOKS (to top)

(based on the MLA Handbook, 6th ed.) For more citation help, see MLA Style in the MUS Library website.

General Format

Author. Title in italics or underlined. Publication place (print): Publisher (print), Publication date (print). Title of site in italics or underlined. [Editor of site or project--not usually applicable to netLibrary]. [Publication date (electronic)--not usually available in netLibrary]. Name of institution or organization sponsoring the site. Date accessed (unique for each user). <URL in angle brackets [use home page where title can be searched]>.

Examples of Publicly Accessible Titles from Other Collections

Ferber, Edna. One Basket. Champaign, Ill: Project Gutenberg, 199?. netLibrary. Memphis U School Lib., TN. 6 Mar. 2006. <http://www.netLibrary.com>.

Robinson, Mary. Sappho and Phaon. London: S. Gosnell, 1796. The Electronic Text Center. 1994. University of Virginia Library. Memphis U School Lib., TN. 6 Mar. 2006. <http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/toc/modeng/ public/RobSapp.html>.

Wharton, Edith. The Age of Innocence. 1920. Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Library, 1996. netLibrary. Memphis U School Lib., TN. 6 Mar. 2006. <http://www.netLibrary.com>.

Examples of Copyrighted Titles

Dronke, Peter. Medieval Latin and the Rise of European Love-Lyric. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968. netLibrary. Memphis U School Lib., TN. 6 Feb. 2006. <http://www.netLibrary.com>.

Zeinert, Karen. Those Courageous Women of the Civil War. Brookfield, Conn.: Millbrook Press, 1998. netLibrary. Memphis U School Lib., TN. 6 Mar. 2006. <http://www.netLibrary.com>.

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