E-book collection grows

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BY Catherine Baird

January 17, 2008

[img_inline align=”right” src=”http://padnws01.mcmaster.ca/images/books1.jpg” caption=”McMaster University Libraries offers a growing number of books and journals online. File photo.”]A year ago, McMaster University Libraries provided access to 50,000 e-books. That number has since grown to more than 240,000 e-books that users can find by searching the library catalogue.

As academic resources continue to migrate online, we are increasing our access to scholarly materials by acquiring electronic resources collaboratively with other Ontario universities. This allows us to stretch our collection budgets further and provide McMaster faculty, students and staff with access to a wealth of research materials from campus and from home.

We have a wide variety of electronic books, including the following collections:

  • 14,000 e-books from Springer, a major science and technology publisher
  • 1,700 items from IEEE
  • 400 titles from Info-Sci Online
  • 6,400 items from the Canadian Electronic Library
  • 1,150 OECD e-books
  • 16,350 titles from Literature Online (LION)
  • 96,000 titles as part of the Early English Books Online (EEBO)
  • 8,800 titles as part of Early Canadiana Online (ECO)
  • 12,200 titles as part of Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO)
  • 1,425 titles as part of the ACLS Humanities e-book project

    Most recently, OCUL (the Ontario Council for University Libraries) developed a strategy for providing efficient access to e-books at Ontario universities. On Jan. 9, OCUL announced that “ebrary” was selected as the Ontario-wide e-book platform. Prior to this decision, McMaster had e-books available on 12 different platforms which may have been confusing for users. We are happy that as a result of this decision, accessing e-books will become much more user-friendly.

    In the near future, we will be able to seamlessly integrate our e-book collection with the Scholars Portal collections and offer both our scholarly electronic journal content and our e-books through a single access point.

    For more information about E-Books @ McMaster, please contact Barbara McDonald at mcdonb@mcmaster.ca or Anne Pottier at pottier@mcmaster.ca.