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Electronic Books Arrive at UCI

As we build our digital collections, our goal is to continue offering the best resources we can to our patrons while respecting the diverse needs of faculty.

The Libraries have purchased collections of electronic books that span numerous disciplines, adding more digital content to our continually expanding collections.

Conducting research in the UCI Libraries becomes more exciting all the time as we continue to expand the formats in which we acquire digital materials: the latest is electronic monographs, or ebooks.

Ebooks have been published for several years. Initially, the emphasis was on historical collections such as the landmark Early English Books Online and the Eighteenth Century Collections Online databases. With the development of sophisticated ebook software (“readers” for short), the focus has shifted to the publishing of current academic texts in electronic format.

This spring, the UCI Libraries launched a new ebook collecting initiative. The software behind our ebooks, MyiLibrary (www.myilibrary.com/browse/open.asp), allows users to search the full text of ebooks as we do with journals, provides for simultaneous multi-user access, allows users to create their own personal “libraries” and even bookmark individual pages or chapters in books.

The Libraries recently acquired Oxford Scholarship Online (www.oxfordscholarship.com), an ebook library from Oxford University Press containing hundreds of titles in diverse disciplines: Philosophy, Economics, Classics, History, Literature, Physics, Music and Mathematics. We also added valuable reference books by purchasing the Gale Virtual Reference Library, a collection of over 1,500 electronic reference titles and Sage eReference, a collection of reference books published by SAGE.

As we build our digital collections, our goal is to continue offering the best resources we can to our patrons while respecting the diverse needs of faculty. Ebooks are not a replacement for our print collections; physical and electronic books are read in very different ways. Ebooks are, however, rapidly becoming a vital part of every research collection as the power of searching thousand of books' full-text simultaneously is realized.

Each ebook title can be searched on Antpac via the usual author, title, and subject searches. The MyiLibrary platform and Oxford Scholarship Online are available via the Libraries’ Online Resources (www.lib.uci.edu/online/resources/eresources.php) page.

For more information contact Lorelei Tanji, Associate University Librarian for Collections (ltanji@uci.edu or x45612).


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