We all agree: print books are lovely. You can read them in bed. When they are new they smell nice and you can get yourself a snazzy bookmark. However, print is a bit less appealing when everyone on the module you’re teaching wants the same book, at the same time for the same assignment and its due in NOW. So, to make vital content available to as many staff and students as possible we are getting hold of as many e-books as we can.
We’ve bought several key e-book packages and are rapidly acquiring as many individual titles from reading lists as we can. Most e-books are available on or off-campus, any time, day or night. All you need is an internet connection and your Athens username and password (students will use Student Sign On). Go to Resources Online. Click on the E-Resources button and you’ll see a whole new section devoted to our e-books packages. There are several new services here, from the Shakespeare E-book Collection to PsycBooks.
If you specialise in English, drama, humanities or psychology you are particularly well catered for, but other subjects don’t lose out either. We have Oxford Reference Online Premium, a collection of dictionaries, encyclopaedia etc. We also have multidisciplinary packages like Taylor & Francis and MyiLibrary. Take a look: you’ll find titles for sport, business, education, nursing, midwifery, geography and social sciences and we are expanding the collection all the time.
A word to the wise: we are limited to buying the books that publishers choose to make available. So while we would love to have all the key texts for all your modules just a click away, some titles simply aren’t available in e-book format yet. But rest assured we are constantly haranguing publishers to try and get as many as we can. Any questions, have a chat with your Academic Liaison Librarian or email us at askalibrarian@worc.ac.uk. Meanwhile, fire up your machine, grab a coffee and snuggle up with an e-book…
