E-books are Coming! No?

E-books are coming! Actually, no, they are already here. While UC Libraries have long had a large collection of e-journals available online, e-books have been growing steadily in numbers. In the last annual report to the Association of Research Libraries, UC Libraries reported access to 392,426 e-books. This number includes collections purchased through OhioLINK, the consortium of 86 Ohio college and research libraries plus the State Library of Ohio.

Types of e-books or collections of e-books

The e-book collections range in size and in type. There are smaller, subject focused collections such as PsycBooks and Safari, the latter covering computer and technology issues. There are very large historic collections, including Early English Books Online (EEBO), the Eighteenth Century Collection Online (ECCO), and Early American Imprints (Evans). ECCO, the largest single collection, contains more than 150,000 e-books. Some collections focus on reference material. Oxford Reference Online, for example, contains over 100 reference books online. There are collections of poetry and drama, women’s history, business, and environmental books, as well as books on many technological subjects.

How do users find e-books?

The first place to look for UC’s e-books is in the online Library Catalog. For many e-book collections, there are records in the catalog for all of the e-books within the collection, with appropriate links to the content. The user will simply find the title of the book and click to its
e-form regardless of the collection to which it belongs, providing the most direct and immediate access to the material. If the e-book collection is coming through OhioLINK, there will often be records in the OhioLINK central catalog, but as UC also puts these titles in its own catalog, looking in the UC Library Catalog first is usually sufficient for finding e-books.

Another access route to e-books, and the one that gives the best overview of the available collections and their subjects, is the “e-book” sort of the A-Z database list, available online at. Near the top of the page, there is a link called “See e-Books.” Clicking on that link will retrieve a list of the collections that contain e-books, including content descriptions and direct links to the online collections.

How to use the e-books?

Not unlike databases in general, e-book collections come in a variety of interfaces. In most cases, content is provided in pdf format, so the content will look like the page of a printed book. Some collections present material in html format, presenting the content but not the format of a page. There are some collections that allow the user to choose between pdf and html. And at least one collection has interactive reference books where a user can input numbers into a formula and get results specific to the question at hand.

Conclusion

e-Books are at UC in a big way, both in number and variety.

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