Cambridge University readers have had access to the Princeton University Press eBooks Library collection hosted on the IEEE Xplore platform as of July 2023. We are pleased to announce that the latest annual collection has recently been added and users now have access to selected STEMM titles published from 1945 through to 2024. All available titles are purchased in perpetuity. The collection includes a wide variety of scientific titles on the cutting edge of research and titles from famous thinkers such as Albert Einstein, Roger Penrose, Stephen Hawking, and Neil deGrasse Tyson.
The Translated Texts for Historians ebook collection contains translated texts of the late antiquity and early medieval period, translated by leading scholars. According to Liverpool University Press, the collection “makes available historical sources from A.D. 300–800 translated into English, in many cases for the first time.” Books included in the collection have been translated from Greek, Latin, Syriac, Arabic, Coptic, Mandaic, and many other languages. The lives of saints, popes, bishops, kings and other important figures in early Christianity are featured. Titles from the collection should be of use to those studying the Classics, Divinity, History, and other related subjects.
The entire collection of translated monographs can be found directly on the Liverpool University Press website, through the ebooks LibGuide, or via subject searches on iDiscover. More content will be added to the collection each year until 2028 in the first instance, covering ebook volumes published through Liverpool University Press until July 31st, 2026. Please note that there is an 18 month publisher-imposed embargo on the access to newly published content.
The purchase of these three additional Wittgenstein collections from Intelex provide access to nearly all his published and previously unpublished texts and letters, which are presented in a mixture of the original German and English and feature contributions from other foundational philosophers contemporary with Wittgenstein. This collection should be of use to both research, and teaching and learning, particularly for students of the German language and/or Philosophy. Wittgenstein’s work and influence feature prominently in the teaching of the Philosophy Tripos.
Screenshot of the Knovel platform home page, displaying the Material Property Search, Interactive Graphs, Property Table Data, and Equations functionality.
According to the Knovel Quick Start Guide, “Knovel is an engineering decision-support solution enabling engineers to solve problems faster. With powerful search and interactive analytical tools, engineers can confidently find answers to technical questions through best practice insights, validated equations and materials and substances data from more than 160 providers.” The Knovel Technical References provide engineering titles, materials property data, insights and tools from the professional world that can support student’s research and development.
The collections include titles from popular publishers such as Wiley, De Gruyter, Springer, various university presses and Elsevier. These handbooks, conference proceedings, and other volumes cover aircraft, spacecraft, radar manufacture and operation, chemical processes, product development, structural engineering, hydraulics, and much more. More than 700 companies from a wide range of engineering industries (such as Aerospace and defense, Chemicals, Energy, Engineering design and construction, Equipment manufacturing) subscribe to the content, demonstrating the platform’s practical applications.
Material Property Search for “silver”
In addition to ebooks, Knovel has the following functions: Material Property Search, Interactive Graphs, Property Table Data, and Equations. Material Property Search allows you to search for materials or substances by their common name, CAS Registry number, molecular formula, and more. Interactive Graphs and Property Table Data allow you to interact with and extract data from graphs and tables found on the platform. In a similar manner, the Equations function pulls out vetted and functional equations referenced in the literature and produces an interactive equation. Another integrated feature is the Engineering Newsfeed, featuring the latest in engineering news and announcements, which appears on the lower half of the Homepage screen, next to your latest Search queries and a regularly updated Information panel.
Users of the Knovel Technical References have the option to create a My Knovel account, which enables you to save and organise content, search queries, tables, equations, and alerts. My Knovel allows you to view all your past searches and activities, including those you might not have saved to make it easier to track your research activity and it enables you to share selected content and searches with other Knovel users.
If you have any questions or issues with access, please contact the ebooks@cambridge team.
A new online resource is available for students of Medicine! The Cancer Handbook from the Wiley Online Major Reference Work series was purchased this summer (July 2023) by the ebooks@cambridge team and is now owned in perpetuity.
Per Wiley, this text provides a comprehensive overview of cancer research and oncology. Articles are divided into the following sections : The Molecular and Cellular Basis of Cancer, The Causation and Prevention of Cancer, Systematic Oncology, Preclinical Models for Human Cancer, The Treatment of Cancer, and Archive. There is also an extensive glossary that defines technical terms and provides a useful reference for readers. This is a second edition and all sections of the Handbook have been revised and updated, excluding imaging.
Articles in the handbook include Cell and Tissue Organization, Mechanisms and Management of Cancer Pain, Genetic Susceptibility to Cancer, Human DNA Tumour Viruses, RNA Tumour Viruses, Genomic Instability and DNA Repair, Telomerase, Apoptosis, and Signalling by Steroid Receptors, Stem Cells and Tumourigenesis, and Occupational Causes of Cancer among many others. There are 136 articles in total.
This reference handbook is now available on iDiscover to University of Cambridge users. If you have any questions or issues with access, please contact the ebooks@cambridge team at ebooks@lib.cam.ac.uk
We are pleased to announce that as of the 1st of August 2023 University of Cambridge users have access to over 4500 additional titles on the popular Taylor & Francis ebooks platform through the Taylor & Francis STEMM netBASE collection. These titles are drawn from the following subjects: Veterinary Medicine, Physics, Medicine, Biomedical Science, Materials Science, Chemistry, Life Sciences, Civil Engineering, Energy and Clean Tech, Industrial Engineering and Mechanical Engineering
The majority of titles are published by CRC Press, a division of Taylor & Francis that specialises in technical books, but there are titles from Jenny Stanford Publishing, Apple Academic Press, Routledge, amongst others. All of the publications were published from 2018-2022 and are searchable in iDiscover. They will hopefully prove useful to the scientists, engineers, and medics out there, whether it be for teaching and learning or to support your research.
You can access this collection from the ebooks LibGuide or directly from this authenticated link to the Taylor & Francis platform. This collection features the same accessibility features as Taylor & Francis, all titles are available without Digital Rights Management (DRM) restrictions and are downloadable. You can sort the title list by relevance, or publication date from the top right corner (as seen in the screenshot below).
Below is a selection of just some of the subjects and titles available over the next year:
Access is available to this collection until the end of July 2024. At the end of the 12-month subscription library staff will select a range of titles to retain in perpetuity based on usage and consultation with the relevant faculty librarians. Please write to the ebooks@cambridge team at ebooks@lib.cam.ac.uk if you have any questions about the new collection or any issues with access.
As of July 26, 2023, Bloomsbury Collections has migrated to a new platform. The URL, www.bloomsburycollections.com has not changed and any links that have been added to our library catalogue prior to the migration should redirect to the new platform. Access methods to the site, whether accessing a title through the authenticated links in iDiscover or logging in to the Bloomsbury Collections site via institutional access (Raven) should be unaffected.
Updated Features
If you had a personal account set up on Bloomsbury before, you will need to create a new account, though you can use the same login and password as used previously. As described in a previous blog post about the platform migration, titles bookmarked on the previous Bloomsbury Collections platform have not been retained. You can set up a new account by going to the upper right-hand corner of the site and selecting ‘Sign in to your personal account’. You can use the same personal account details for various Bloomsbury platforms, including Churchill Archive.
My Saved Items
When browsing the new platform you can save books, chapters, articles, cases, images, or other items to your personal account, which can be viewed under “My Content” which can be selected from the top right-hand corner by clicking on your username. When saving a title to your account, you will be prompted to select a folder to save it to. There is a default folder called “My Folder,” but you can create your own folder or folders when saving an item or when viewing your saved items in “My Saved Items”.
My Saved Searches
In addition to saving titles to your personal account, you can now save search terms to your account. Both are listed under your personal account, with one tab for saved titles “My Saved Items” and saved search terms under “My Saved Searches.” Within “My Saved Searches,” you can also sign up for email alerts to receive an alert whenever relevant content related to your search is added to Bloomsbury Collections. To manage whether you receive email alerts about your saved searches click on the bell icon to switch alerts on and off. You will have to turn email alerts on after first saving your search. This is a new feature to Bloomsbury and will hopefully be of use to you in your research!
Collections
Titles on Bloomsbury are all provided with DRM free access, which means greater accessibility with the ability to download chapters. In addition to individual titles that have been purchased because of reader and academic requests, and more than 350 Open Access titles, Cambridge readers have access to selective collections as follows:
Subject Collections: Africa, Asia and Latin American Studies 2022; Anthropology 2014-19; Art & Visual Culture 2022; Education 2020; Film & Media Studies 2014-22; History 2015-16; Literary Studies 2015; Middle East 2019-22; Philosophy 2015; Politics & International Relations 2019 and 2022; Religious Studies 2019 and 2022; Theology 2015-18
Archive Collections: Ancient History 1983-2012; Ancient Philosophy 1984-2012; Classical Literature 1994-2012; Hart Publishing all archive collections except the practitioner collection. Zed Books Sexuality and Gender Studies Archive
Law Collections: Hart Publishing 2014-23; Hart Publishing all archive collections except the practitioner collection; C.H.Beck – Hart – Nomos 2014-16
Special Collections: Education Around the World; Zed Books Sex (Sexuality) and Gender Studies 2017-20; Zed Books Sexuality and Gender Studies Archive
New for August 2023 an extra 1850 titles (publication years 2021-2023) are being opened up for 12 months access on Bloomsbury Collections. Further details will follow in a future blogpost.
Please see Bloomsbury’s FAQ page if you have any further questions or comments about the platform migration. If you have any questions about access to titles or want more tips for how to use ebook platforms, contact ebooks@cambridge.
Next month, Bloomsbury Collections will migrate to a newly designed platform. Though the website will remain www.bloomsburycollections.com, there will be several changes to the platform which should make it easier to navigate, browse, and search. There will not be a change to the content available on the platform, only the navigability of the resources there. There will also be no change to the way that readers access the platform.
*Prior to Migration* Users Need to Move Saved content
The key information for current user of Bloomsbury Collections is that bookmarks saved to personal accounts on the current Bloomsbury Collections site will not be retained. Personal accounts on the current Bloomsbury Collections platform will not transfer to the new one. There will be further information from Bloomsbury about how to set up your personal account and save items and search terms, the important point to note now is to bookmark your current saved items to your browser for now.
The login link for bookmarked titles on Bloomsbury can currently be found by clicking on “My Collections” at the top of the page next to the Search bar. Once you log in to your personal account, the titles you have bookmarked will all be listed under “My Content.” How you bookmark the rest of the titles is up to you, one tip would be to use the “Cite All” or “Email All” feature which will provide you with a list of the titles you have saved in Bloomsbury’s platform along with DOI links, retrieval dates, and other important details. The DOI links will continue to work on the new platform. Make sure to save that information somewhere secure before the end of July 2023.
You can refer to Bloomsbury’s FAQ page here for further information about the platform migration or contact ebooks@cambridge if you have any questions or concerns.
Last month Brown’s Books, our supplier of VLeBooks ebooks, announced a suite of new features that aim to improve functionality. You may have noticed them already if you have read VLeBooks titles since May 2023.
Multiple format types
There are two format types commonly used in accessing ebooks, PDF and ePub. PDF, Portable Document Format, is a fixed format that tends to mirror the print book in appearance and layout. ePub is a reflowable format and can be adapted to suit the needs of the user by resizing font, changing the background colour, or adapting other accessibility features.
Previously when readers selected the “Read Online” or “Download” button on VLeBooks it would default to one of the two formats depending on what was available.
Now for titles where both the ePub and PDF format are available there is a drop-down selection arrow for format type. If you click on the arrow, you can select either format, whether reading online or downloading chapters to your device. This gives readers more choice in accessing these ebook titles, as everyone can select their preferred format for reading and note-taking. Annotations and bookmarks are tied to the format file rather than the title, so bear in mind that notes taken while using the ePub reader will not transfer to the PDF and vice versa. For more information on downloading from DRM-restricted ebooks, see our previous blog post.
Chapter Links
Readers can now save links to specific chapters from the Table of Contents. Right-click on the chapter title on the main page of the ebook and copy the link to the chapter to your clipboard. If a user follows the link, they will be taken to the same page and will need to either select the ePub format or click “Read Online” which will direct to the ePub by default before they are redirected to the specific chapter. The chapter link function only works if the user reads the ePub format, not PDF format.
Improved Site messages
The error message generated when a reader tries to access a title which is already in use and the reservations feature is disabled has been changed to provide more information. The message was previously “this title is not available for you to read online/download.” but it now reads “this title is not available for you to read online as all licences are currently in use. Please try again later”
Feedback
These changes are welcome as part of a trend of Brown’s taking on board user feedback and feedback from our team as purchasers of ebooks. Last year, Brown’s increased the available formats of turnaway reports making it easier for our team to make informed decisions about when to repurchase ebooks or purchase additional licenses of popular ebooks. We are happy to see these changes being introduced by Brown’s based on our team’s feedback as well as user feedback. If you have any suggestions for improving any ebooks platform, please contact the ebooks@cambridge team. We are always keen to hear from readers!
In January 2023, the UL’s evidence-based (EBA) scheme for Social Sciences and Humanities (SSH) titles with De Gruyter was renewed for another calendar year. This scheme provides access to a growing list of titles and each year we can select a group of titles from the EBA scheme to own permanently. See this blog post for more information about the renewal.
The EBA scheme for SSH titles has been run at Cambridge University Library since 2015. In 2016, the scheme was expanded to include Science, Technology and Medicine (STM) titles with the contribution of the Betty and Gordon Moore Library paying for the additional cost. In late 2022 the decision was made by STEMM librarians to no longer participate in the STM component of the EBA. This decision was based on usage statistics provided by De Gruyter, the same usage statistics that are used to make yearly purchase selections. This decision meant that 10,500 unowned STM title records had to be removed from the library catalogue.
The ebooks team set to task ensuring that only unowned title records were removed from the catalogue and that all the previously purchased STM title records were retained. Firstly, the purchased De Gruyter STM title records needed to be assigned to a new electronic collection in the library management system as this is the best way to identify and manage the records we wanted to keep. All ebook title records in iDiscover are attached to electronic collections, the collection name can be seen when selecting an ebook record on iDiscover in the text hyperlink after “Full text available at”
Title records had to be individually edited in our library management software, each record was moved from the unowned EBA collection pool (de Gruyter eBooks Complete) to the new collection, De Gruyter STEMM Ebooks Perpetual. We also edited the notes field of the records to remove any reference to the EBA scheme and we ensured that the link to the full text on the De Gruyter platform was working. Every title in the collection is automatically provided with the public note “Unlimited Concurrent Access”, this is set at the collection level as every De Gruyter ebook title is both unlimited access and DRM-free.
From 2016 to 2022, STM titles were selected annually for permanent purchase by STEMM librarians, so around 500 title records needed to be edited and moved over, to prevent accidental deletion. In early 2023, De Gruyter provided a list of STM EBA records to be deleted, making sure to remove the final selection of 139 titles for permanent purchase. Deleting the unowned records was a batch job process, and another smaller manual job was done to move those 139 titles from the EBA collection to the STEMM collection. There are now 652 title records attached to the De Gruyter STEMM Ebooks Perpetual collection. Below is a small sample of the varied titles that we hold as a result of participating in the STM EBA scheme for six years.
ebooks@cambridge 