Ebrary
Ebrary is an online digital library of full texts of over 70,000 scholarly e-books.[1] It is available at many academic libraries and provides a set of online database collections that combine scholarly books from over 435 academic, trade, and professional publishers. It also includes sheet music (9,000 titles) and government documents. Additionally, ebrary offers content services—DASH! (do-it-yourself), software as a service (SaaS) and licensed—for customers to cost-effectively distribute their own PDF content online.
Ebrary contains a suite of reference tools and a rich collection that includes books, journals, magazines, maps, and other publications. Illustrations are included. Users gain access through a subscribing library and can browse, view, search, copy, and print documents from their computers. Ebrary's aggregated collections cover academic disciplines including business and economics, computers, technology and engineering, humanities, life and physical science, and social and behavioral sciences.
Founded in 1999 and headquartered in Palo Alto, California, ebrary was acquired by ProQuest in 2011. It had 2,700 subscribers (mostly libraries) at the end of 2009.
Allen W. McKiel, the director of libraries at Northeastern State University, looked at the response of 550 libraries worldwide using ebrary. He found three broad patterns. First, librarians are deciding about optimizing access to content that is relevant to their own institutions. Second, e-book collections and the research opportunities that they provide are poorly understood and underutilized by many of the faculty and students. Third, more librarians are participating in the distribution of e-content. McKiel predicted that academic libraries will play an increasing role in epublication for their institutions.[2]
Notes
- ^ "Academic Complete Surpasses 70,000 E-books".
- ^ Barbara Brynko, "Global Survey Offers Insight Into Libraries' Use of Ebooks," Information Today Jul/Aug2007, Vol. 24 Issue 7
References
- Babson College Library, "ebrary: Electronic Books" online
- Fialkoff, Francine. "The Book Is Not Dead," Library Journal, (June 15, 2009) Vol. 134 Issue 11
- Godwin-Jones, Robert. "E-Books and the Tablet PC," Language, Learning & Technology Vol. 7, 2003
- Raisinghani, Mahesh S. "Wireless Library Aids Student Productivity," T H E Journal Vol. 30, 2002
- Walshe, Emily, and Marilyn Rosenthal, "ebrary" Long Island University Library (2006) online
- University of California, Berkeley, Library. "Getting started with ebrary"
- "First Global Faculty E-book Survey Results," Edutech Report, Dec2007, Vol. 23 Issue 12