Ebook access improved.

Those of you who use the Library’s eJournal portal to discover and access eJournals will have found that eBooks are now also visible in this service.

The Library has instituted this change in order to improve access to our growing volume of eBooks. The service exposes a significant number of eBooks which are in bundled in with our databases but which were not previously individually catalogued and were, as a result, hard to find and use.

As part of this improvement the Library is working to import individual records for each of the eBooks into the Library catalogue so that they can be discovered and accessed along with the print books. The majority of our eBooks were already catalogued but this project will upgrade these records and add new records for the titles ‘hidden’ with databases. Searching in the eJournal portal is limited to title or ISBN but the catalogue records include subject headings and contents information which enable ‘keyword’ searching for eBooks.

Once the records for the eBooks are imported the Library plans to make it possible to search the eBooks as a specific collection within the Library Catalogue. It will then be possible to limit a search to the contents of specific libraries and the eBooks (and thereby exclude titles not immediately available because they are at a different campus).

There are a few eBook collections we have yet to add to the eJournal portal (such as the Oxford Medical Handbooks) but these will be added as soon as possible.

You can access any of the eBooks by collection from the Library’s eBooks webpage.