E-Books Have Arrived!

 NetLibrary Now Part of EbscoHost

The Hyde Library at MUS (and the other three MAISLIC libraries) have bought NetLibrary collections for years and now have over 40,000 titles in the shared collection. This summer (2011), NetLibrary became part of EbscoHost, the provider of thousands of journal titles and other library resources. How will this affect you?

 

First, you can still find NetLibrary ebooks in the library catalog and open them by clicking on the links in the records. The interface is similar to the old one but has been improved and works better. You can also go to EbscoHost and search for ebooks separately or include journals in your search at http://search.ebscohost.com/.   

 

Second, you no longer have to set up an individual account on the MUS campus. If you're off campus, you can log in with the library's general username and password, and you can set up your own individual account for more options. (Unfortunately, if you had a set of notes on the NetLibrary platform, they are no longer saved, but you can create the ones you need now.)

 

Third, it's still a shared collection, so if someone else is using all the copies of a book, you will see a message that says to try again later. You can still create notes, search inside the book, and save favorites. In addition, you can now print up to 60 pages, email part of a book, and see the MLA citation. If you search the EbscoHost "All Databases," you will get both book and journal results on the same topic. Try it out, see how you like it, and let us know

HOW TO SEARCH

  • through the library's Online Catalog 

  • directly through EbscoHost at http://search.ebscohost.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.

HOW TO VIEW AN E-BOOK              

  • In the left column, you can click on "eBook Full Text." While you view it, it will not be available to any other user in the Southeastern network, but there may be other copies available at the same time. 

 VALUE:

  • adds thousands of titles to our collection

  • 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 

  • 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

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   

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 Books  Google is developing a massive collection of ebooks; copyrighted books until recently have only been available in "snippets." There are links on all the results pages to publishers and to Amazon.com, so this has a commercial element.  But it also has a "Find this book in a library" feature and links to OCLC's WorldCat, an international database that includes the collections at MUS and the other MAISLIC libraries. To look for a book, enter the word book and the title in the Google search box, or go to http://books.google.com/.

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