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.
The ebooks@cambridge team has learned that there is anxiety among some students about the future of ebook provision at Cambridge, with concerns that ebook access is at risk of being scaled back. After hearing this, we wanted to put out a blog post to offer some reassurance. We would also like to address a recent issue, where a major publisher withdrew their titles from a large ebook subscription and then later backtracked, as we believe that this may have sparked some of these worries.
The main point to emphasise is that there are absolutely no plans to reduce our investment in ebooks. The ebooks team at Cambridge works closely with faculty, departmental and College libraries to provide online books for teaching and learning, and we believe that continued investment in both individually purchased ebooks and in collections plays a vital role in providing inclusive access to teaching resources.
It is true that our ability to provide ebook access is subject to the academic publishers, and there will be times when we are either not able to provide certain texts as ebooks, owing to high costs or non-availability (you can find further details on our LibGuide), or where subscription access (and sometimes sales rights) is withdrawn by a publisher.
Many of the ebook collections we buy are permanent, and will never disappear, but some collections are only available as yearly subscriptions. The great thing about these subscriptions is that we can unlock huge selections of titles, offering students far wider online access than if we only bought ebooks on a title-by-title basis or in permanent collections. The downside is that we don’t own these ebooks, and nor is continued access to these titles guaranteed as part of the subscription package.
Two of our big ebook subscriptions are ProQuest’s Ebook Central Academic Complete and EBSCO Academic. Each subscription provides access to over 200,000 ebooks, and the collections are refreshed twice a year: every January and every June, new content is added, but (on the flipside) a small percentage of the content is also withdrawn at the request of the publishers. The ebooks team receives advance warning of these withdrawals, and we liaise with faculty libraries to purchase the ebooks that are on reading lists. Where this is not possible, librarians will put chapters on Moodle or buy extra print copies.
Occasionally, a publisher will decide to remove a larger than usual number of titles from a subscription collection. You may have heard that the publisher Wiley recently caused controversy by removing thousands of titles from the Ebook Central Academic Complete subscription, many of which were hugely popular reading list titles. Wiley withdrew these titles just ahead of the new academic year, which was bad enough, but they also limited the ebook purchase options for these works, so that the titles were only available to buy with temporary licenses, some of them at prices so high that they were practically unaffordable. There was an outcry from academic librarians, with the result that Wiley has now temporarily reinstated access to the ebooks until June 2023. You can read more about this case on the ebookSOS campaign website.
The Wiley issue illustrates some of the problems with the current academic ebook market, but there are positives too. Academic librarians are working to change academic publishing so that future ebook access is more sustainable and fair, partly through campaign initiatives like ebookSOS, but also in the drive towards open access publishing. Open access is very much on the agenda at Cambridge, and we have started to support more open access ebook schemes, with plans to expand this investment in the future.
At Cambridge, too, we try to tailor our electronic collections to the needs of our students and researchers. Some of our ebook subscriptions are known as “evidence based” or “demand driven”, which in short allows us to make thousands of ebooks available in the catalogue, but we only buy the titles that are actually being used. As mentioned earlier, the ebooks@cambridge team also work with our colleagues in faculty, departmental and College libraries to provide access to specific ebooks for taught courses. We will always try to make an ebook available for teaching and learning where it is possible and affordable to do so; where it is not possible, librarians will provide print copies, chapter scans, or liaise with academics to find alternative texts.
Please do get in touch if you have any questions or worries about this issue. You can write to the ebooks team at: ebooks@lib.cam.ac.uk
Please also feel free to reach out to the ebooks team if you ever have any questions about using ebooks, problems accessing or finding ebooks, or if you have any feedback. You can also request new ebooks through the online “New book” form, and it will be funnelled to the relevant team. We are all here to help and we are always happy to hear from you.
I’m pleased to announce that the UL’s Collections and Academic Liaison has purchased Duke University Press’s 2023 ebooks collection. As in previous years, this means that we will be buying c. 120-130 DRM-free (i.e. unlimited access) titles, and we will continue to have access to nearly 3,000 backlist titles for the duration of 2023.
Duke University Press has the following mission statement: We exist to share the ideas of bold, progressive thinkers and support emerging and vital fields of scholarship. We thrive as a nonprofit publisher because we adapt, innovate, and form strong global partnerships. It is our mission to find, curate, enrich, and disseminate scholarship that is vital to readers working at the forefront of their fields in the humanities, social sciences, and mathematics. A selection of recently published Duke titles can be seen below (click here to skip to a list of iDiscover links). If you have any questions about Duke ebooks, please do get in touch with the English Collections team (engcc@lib.cam.ac.uk).
I’m pleased to be able to announce that the UL has purchased Duke University Press’s 2022 ebooks collection. The UL has been buying Duke’s annual collections for the past few years, and they are a well-used resource. The 2022 collection will include at least 120 titles, to which we will have perpetual access; in addition, we will continue to have access to Duke’s extensive backlist (nearly 3,000 titles) for the whole of 2022. The ebooks have the advantage of being DRM-free, meaning they can be downloaded in full and kept in perpetuity by readers, with no limits on the number of people who can access a title concurrently.
Duke University Press publishes widely in the humanities and social sciences, including in emerging areas of research. Key subject areas for them include anthropology, art history, Asian studies, film and television studies, gender and sexuality studies, and Latin American studies. A handful of recently published titles can be seen below.
As we complete the first full academic year since the pandemic began, we thought that it would be a nice idea to look back at our year (and a bit) in ebooks. The first lockdown in March 2020 saw a huge surge in demand for electronic resources, with a staggering 2230 new title-by-title ebooks purchased by the central ebooks team for teaching and research between March 16th and the close of the financial year at the end of July! (In comparison, 519 new ebooks were purchased during the same period in the previous year.) Thousands of ebooks were also made temporarily available via trial subscriptions.
The 2020-21 academic year has been another exceptional year in terms of expanding ebook access, and the remainder of this blog post will provide a brief overview of the title-by-title ebooks, new ebook platforms, and ebook subcriptions/packages acquired over the past 12 months.
Before going any further, it is worth noting that the past 16 months have involved a huge collaborative effort between the ebooks team, the faculty and departmental libraries, research teams at the UL, and college libraries. There has also been tremendous support provided by colleagues at the UL: the Electronic Collection Management team, Materials Processing, Digital Services, and our fellow Collections and Academic Liaison-ers, who have checked seemingly endless lists of ebooks, have helped with loading records and ebook portfolios, and with purchasing. Such extensive ebooks provision would also not have been possible without additional funds generously released by the Colleges, the University, and the University Library. Thank you to all!
Title-by-title ebook purchases
Between August 2020 and July 2021, 5809 new title-by-title ebooks were purchased by the central ebooks team, by faculty and departmental libraries, and by research collections teams at the UL.
This includes:
2676 new ebook titles purchased by the central ebooks team for teaching and learning, with thanks to recommendations from faculty and departmental libraries, college libraries, and Cambridge University students and staff.
1892 new ebooks purchased by faculty and departmental libraries (Biological Sciences (research), Business & Management, Classics, Education, English, HPS, Medicine, MMLL, Music, Philosophy and Psychology).
1241 new ebooks purchased by research collections teams at the UL.
2251 new titles purchased for subjects in the Arts & Humanities.
2485 new titles purchased for subjects in the Humanities & Social Sciences.
701 new titles purchased for STEMM subjects.
57 new French language titles from Amalivre, which you can read more about here.
82 new Japanese language titles from KinoDen (Kinokuniya Digital Library).
30 ebooks of statistics and analysis about the 2001 Ukrainian census from East View (29 in Ukrainian). You can read more about these resources here.
Cambridge’s first Russian language ebook was also purchased from East View. More information here.
2 new Korean language titles from ebook platform BookRail.
Below is a small sample of some of the new title-by-title ebooks acquired in 2020-21. All of these titles can be found in iDiscover. Alternatively, follow the title links below the cover images for access.
Sezgin Online: volumes 1-9 of Fuat Sezgin’s renowned Geschichte des arabischen Schrifttums (GAS), the largest bio-bibliography for the Arabic literary tradition, particularly for the history of science and technology in the Islamic world.
All titles from the below collections/subscriptions (except Perlego) can be found in iDiscover.
Research (new)
Access to nearly 10,000 Russian ebooks through a subscription to BiblioRossica’s Leading Russian Scholarly Presses package. Please see this blogpost for more information.
Brill Online Collections: Schöningh and Fink History: Early Modern and Modern History (2020 collection & 2021 collection).
Permanent access to the Knowledge Unlatched Routledge African Studies Collection (partly funded by UL research budgets).
Annual subscription to the Art & Architecture ePortal (A&AePortal) (funded in 2020-21 by the Art History and Architecture library). More details about the platform can be found here.
Permanent access to the three John Dewey components on Intelex Past Masters (partly funded by the Whipple Library and the Department of History and Philosophy of Science). Please see this blogpost for more information.
Taylor & Francis HSS and STEM deep backlist collections
STEMM
Subscription to ClinicalKey. Please see the blogpost here for more information.
A subscription to O’Reilly for Higher Education, with titles in the Arts/Humanities/Social Sciences/STEMM but with a particular strength in technology.
Institute of Physics (IOP): EBA for the Concise and Expanding Physics series (releases 4-6) and their 2020 ebook collection. Cambridge also has perpetual access to the Concise and Expanding Physics series (releases 1-3) and AAS-IOP Astronomy (releases 1-2).
1000 Perlego accounts until the end of September 2021, which have largely been used for research and for some smaller teaching cohorts. Please see here for more information.
I’m pleased to be able to announce that the UL has purchased Duke University Press’s 2020 ebooks collection. This means that, as well as acquiring perpetual access to the ebooks within the collection (there will be around 130 in total, once they have all been published), Cambridge users will continue to have access to Duke’s extensive backlist for the duration of the agreement. Duke are renowned for their cutting-edge scholarship, and the UL has now acquired their ebook collections every year since 2016; you can read more about Duke ebooks in this blogpost. As with other content that we acquire directly from publishers, the ebooks are DRM-free, i.e. without restrictions on downloading or the number of concurrent users.
Records for the ebooks will be added to iDiscover on a monthly basis, as they are released. You can see a selection of the 2020 titles which are already available below.
Since 2016, the UL (initially with assistance from ebooks@cambridge) has purchased Duke University Press’s annual ebook collections. Based in North Carolina, Duke publishes around 130 books per year in a wide range of subjects across the arts and humanities. Its offering is highly interdisciplinary, with particular strengths in areas such as anthropology, cultural studies, film and television studies, and gender and sexuality studies.
Buying the annual ebook collections has notable advantages over buying the ebooks on a title-by-title basis from aggregators. As with Brill, whose subject collections I wrote about last month, ebooks on the Duke platform come without any digital rights management (i.e. no restrictions on downloading or concurrent users). Additionally, as well as acquiring the ebooks included in the annual collection in perpetuity, we gain (DRM-free) electronic access to Duke’s backlist of 2,700 titles for the duration of each annual agreement. This is a huge bonus, as some of these older titles are on reading lists, and they get a lot of hits. In 2018, the most recent year for which we currently have usage statistics, Duke had 24,410 accesses in total; the most-viewed book was Sara Ahmed’s Living a Feminist Life, published in 2017, but second on the list (with 279 hits) was a 2007 title, Beyond Exoticism: Western Music and the World, and the third, Neoliberalism as Exception: Mutations in Citizenship and Sovereignty, dates from 2006. In all, 1338 different titles were accessed on the Duke platform in 2018, of which 40 were accessed at least 100 times each.
Records for these ebooks are added to iDiscover every few weeks. A selection of some of the most recent titles can be seen below.
The Arab Leaders, Historians and Philosophers Collection provides a compendium of early works of an astounding variety of disciplines from important Arab writers, spanning fields from feminism and social theory, to classics of literature, history, and the sciences. Includes works by the Four Imams of the Sunni Sect, the Al Azhar Modern Sheikhs, various authors of the Modern Arab Enlightenment, and rare works by the former Egyptian royal family.
Kotobarabia is the largest online provider of Arabic ebooks and one of the leading Arabic digitisation agencies in the world.
Content is mainly in Arabic with metadata in both Arabic and transliteration, and you can search the platform in English, by author, title, subject and publisher.Titles can be printed and downloaded as PDFs, and users can create their own customised favourite title lists on the East View platform.
Searches in Arabic script are supported on the kotobarabiaplatform.
Titles are searchable in LibrarySearch and available both on and off campus (with a Raven login).
ebooks@cambridge 