Collins Unbound

March 2012

An Introduction to Academic E-Books

Tell us what you think: Take our short opinion poll about e-books:   https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/CVZ66TF.

Collins Library provides University of Puget Sound users access to 1000’s of full-text e-books from a number of academic publishers.   They can be viewed online, or downloaded for reading on-the-go using selected mobile devices and tablets, like the iPad.   We’ve created an easy how-to Guide to e-books, and have highlighted a few select points below.

How can I discover which e-books we have access to? The easiest way to find e-books available through the Collins Memorial Library is through our catalog, Puget Sound WorldCat. Our Guide to e-books provides step-by-step instructions on searching for e-books.

What type of e-books does the Library have? We currently provide access to a variety of e-books from academic monographs to reference resources.  These are a few of our main e-book providers.

EBL:  EBL (Ebook Library) offers tens of thousands of individual e-books spanning a wide range of academic and professional subject areas.  You can browse by categories such as Fine Arts, Social Sciences, or Business and Management, then limit by year or language.  Or search for a specific title.  This is our most up-to-date e-book collection and one that is available as a result of our Orbis Cascade Alliance collaboration.

EBSCO E-Books: There are a significant number of e-books available through the EBSCOhost platform, however, because Collins Library does not purchase new e-books from EBSCO, most of these e-books are older.  To download e-books you will need to create a “My EBSCOhost” account.

Gale Virtual Reference Library:  Provides full text access to over 100 encyclopedias and other electronic reference sources from a variety of publishers.

Oxford Reference Online:  Contains the complete texts of over 200 Oxford companions, encyclopedias, dictionaries and other reference titles which, beyond text articles, include images, maps, timelines, bibliographies, photographs and much more.

Sage Reference Online:  A collection of the electronic versions of many of Sage’s print encyclopedias and handbooks including, the Encyclopedia of Activism and Social Justice, Encyclopedia of African American Society, International Encyclopedia of Political Science, Encyclopedia of Business Ethics and Society, Encyclopedia of Children, Adolescents, and the Media, and the Handbook of Death & Dying to name just a few.

How can I download Collins e-books?: EBL and EBSCO e-books are available for download in EPUB, a format especially designed for electronic books.  These files can be downloaded to your home computer or laptop, and also to many mobile devices including dedicated e-book readers such as the Nook, or generic mobile devices such as the iPhone or iPad, or Android tablets and phones.  Both EBL and EBSCO e-books are designed for Adobe Digital Editions. To access all of Adobe Digital Editions features, and to avoid interruptions when you’re downloading to a mobile device, register for an Adobe Digital ID.

Get Adobe Digital Editions
Sign up for an Adobe Digital ID

If you don’t have a dedicated e-reader (like Nook, Sony, or Kobo) and are using an iOS or android device, you will need software that allows you to read the e-book.  Bluefire e-book reader is available for both android and iOS devices.  You can get Bluefire Reader as you download your first e-book.

Get the Bluefire e-book reader app

Is there a good guide to “free” e-books? We have listed many popular open source or “free” e-book collections on our Guide to e-books.  Some of the more popular collections are:

Project Gutenberg

Offers over 36,000 free e-books to download to your PC, Kindle, iPad, iPhone, Android or other portable device. Choose between ePub, Kindle, HTML and simple text formats. Most books are in the public domain, free of copyright restrictions, mainly published prior to 1923.

Open Library
Offers over 1,000,000 free e-books.  Open Library is a project of the non-profit Internet Archive, and has been funded in part by a grant from the California State Library and the Kahle/Austin Foundation.

Online Books Page
Lists over 35,000 free books on the Web, including Banned Books online, from John Mark Ockerbloom at the University of Pennsylvania.

Tell us what you think:  Take our short opinion poll about e-books:   https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/CVZ66TF.

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Need Information? Don’t forget the Collins Memorial Library Database List A-Z
Questions? Contact your liaison librarian
Comments: Contact Jane Carlin, Library Director
Remember – Your best search engine is a Librarian!

April 2012

125 Years in the Stacks

In anticipation of our 125^th anniversary in 2013, we are embarking on a  project to identify 125 items from our library collection that will provide a view of the University of Puget Sound through its library collections.  Think of this as a tour of our open stacks, the Shelmidine Rare Book Room, our archives, and even occasional glimpses into our electronic collections.

The Library has close to one million volumes so it goes without saying that we have some very interesting publications in our stacks.

But don’t expect the expected.  We are not trying to list the 125 most important scholarly works ever published.  Like Puget Sound, we want to identify publications that delight, surprise, make you laugh, contemplate an idea, or even publications that are just a little bit quirky!

We would love your suggestions.  Use this web form, Found in the Stacks Form – University of Puget Sound, to share your ideas, or if you like, just let us know a period or event that you would like our intrepid library researchers to uncover a special publication on.  It could be a publication related to an important event in the last 125 years, or a key advance in your subject discipline, or a publication that focuses on the changing norms of society.

To get you thinking, here are a few gems we have already unearthed from our first decade!

Strolls by Starlight and Sunshine by William Hamilton Gibson, 1890
Beautifully bound by Alice C. Morse.
A beautifully illustrated book including a personal narrative
by the author about his ramblings in the great outdoors.

Gossip in a Library by Edmund Gosse, 1892
The librarian in me just could not resist this title!
The author, both a poet and librarian, provides this statement about the book’s content:
“I have been asked to gossip about my books for I also am a bibliophile.
But when I think of the great collections of fine books, of the libraries of the magnificent,
I do not know whether I dare admit any stranger to glance at mine.”

From the Land of the Snow Pearls by Ella Higginson, 1897
This small beautifully bound volume is a collection of tales from Puget Sound.

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Need Information? Don’t forget the Collins Memorial Library Database List A-Z
Questions? Contact your liaison librarian
Comments: Contact Jane Carlin, Library Director
Remember – Your best search engine is a Librarian!