Monday, January 23, 2012

Over 72,000 E-Books Now Available through Ebrary's Academic Complete

Ebrary's Academic Complete, a collection of over 72,000 electronic books from major publishers suitable for university libraries, is now being provided through the Cheng Library. Over 290 publishers - including Oxford University Press, Taylor and Francis, Brill Academic Publishers, John Wiley and Sons, Cambridge University Press, and Ashgate Publishing - are represented in the collection, and there is something for every field of study on campus. Approximately 75 percent of the e-books in the collection were published within the last ten years, making Academic Complete an excellent source of recent scholarship.

The Ebrary platform offers a variety of features for using ebooks, including:
  •     Support for mobiles devices: iPad, iPhone, Kindle, Kobo, Nook, and Sony Reader
  •     The ability to create notes and highlight text within any ebook you use
  •     Personal bookshelves that automatically store links to highlights, notes, and more, providing an archive of research
  •     Multiple options for searching and navigating
  •     Automatic citations when text is printed or copied and pasted into Word or any text applications
  •     the ability to transform text into a hyperlink to a URL of your choice
  •     Text-to-speech and other keyboard shortcuts to assist end-users with special accessibility needs
A brief online training video provides a quick orientation to the Ebrary platform, and a two-page paper Quick Start Guide (in PDF format) is also available online.

With the acquisition of Academic Complete, the Cheng Library now offers a total of over 76,000 electronic books, representing more than 20 percent of the Library's entire book collection. All of our e-books are accessible through the Library Catalog and can be used off-campus at any time of day or night. E-books in the catalog can be identified by the following signs:
  • They all include "[electronic resource]" as part of the displayed title in search results
  • Their "Location" in the Library is always listed as "Internet Resource"
  • The catalog record for every e-book includes a "Linked Resources" hyperlink prominently displayed near the top of the catalog record - just click on it to go to the book
This semester the Cheng Library will be offering three training workshops to help you get the most out of e-books. The workshop, titled "E-Books for Everyone: Using E-Books for Coursework, Research, and Teaching" will be offered on
  • Thursday, February 9, 3:30-4:30 pm, Cheng Library Paterson Room (Room 213)
  • Wednesday, March 14, 3:30-4:30 pm, Valley Road Building (Room TBA)
  • Thursday, April 12, 3:30-4:30 pm, Cheng Library Amy Job Classroom (Room 114a)
Cheng Library staff are also available to offer e-book training by appointment for classes or to individuals at the Reference Desk. We urge everyone to give e-books a try this semester and let us know what you think. Please contact Richard Kearney (x 2165) if you have any questions or comments about our e-books.

Saturday, January 21, 2012

JSTOR Gets Bigger and Better - Thanks to WPUNJ Students!

This semester the Cheng Library has acquired three new journal collections for our JSTOR electronic archive: the Arts and Sciences Collection V, VI, and VIII. Along with the four collections already offered, we are now providing archival access to a total of over 1,500 titles, with over 890 titles - some 60 percent of the full collection - supplemented each year with new content. The three new collections increase the number of journals available through JSTOR by over 40 percent.

Our JSTOR electronic archive offers the complete backfiles of major journals in over 40 disciplines, with particular strengths in language and literature, art and art history, history, business, American studies and area studies, political science, philosophy, education, music, anthropology, mathematics and statistics, archaeology, and religion. In most cases a journal's archive extends back to the first published issue, making JSTOR a treasure trove of both high-quality contemporary scholarship and intellectual history (see, for example, one of the oldest items in JSTOR, the first issue of the "Transactions of the American Philosophical Society" published in 1769). In addition to the titles in our seven purchased collections, all other full-text journal articles in JSTOR published prior to 1923 are now accessible as well through the database.

Our acquisition of the JSTOR Arts and Sciences Collection V, VI, and VIII was funded through a generous gift from the Student Government Association (SGA). Thanks to the student's elected representatives, all WPUNJ students, faculty and staff will benefit from the rich resources provided by these collections. The Cheng Library is most grateful to the SGA for this contribution.