New ebook package: JSTOR Path to Open

The University of Cambridge has signed up to join JSTOR’s new Path to Open ebook scheme. This is a major Open Access initiative from JSTOR, which involves publishing 1,000 ebooks from over thirty different academic publishers between now and the end of 2026. For a period of three years after publication, each title will only be available as an ebook to those institutions who are participating in Path to Open; after the end of this embargo period, they will go on to be made Open Access, and will be freely available to readers worldwide.

There will be 100 titles published in the scheme in 2023 (you can find a title list here), with 300 per year in each of the three following years. So far, nearly 60 books are available, and records for these should display in iDiscover soon. We have committed to the scheme until the end of 2024 in the first instance, with our participation being funded from a number of different UL budgets, including Collections and Academic Liaison and the Office of Scholarly Communications.

Some of the newly available ebooks can be seen below (click here to skip to the list of iDiscover links). If you have any questions about this scheme, please do get in touch with the English Collections team.

• Awakening the Ashes : An Intellectual History of the Haitian Revolution
• Book Anatomy : Body Politics and the Materiality of Indigenous Book History
• Han Heroes and Yamato Warriors : Competing Masculinities in Chinese and Japanese War Cinema
• Imagining Musical Pasts : The Queer Literary Musicology of Vernon Lee, Rosa Newmarch, and Edward Prime-Stevenson
• Living Politics in the City : Architecture as Catalyst for Public Space
• Middlebrow 2.0 and the Digital Affect : Online Reading Communities of the New Nigerian Novel
• The Race for America : Black Internationalism in the Age of Manifest Destiny
• Urban Indigeneities : Being Indigenous in the Twenty-First Century

Ebook Central and JSTOR DDAs: August-October update

Between the beginning of August and the end of October, 245 titles were triggered for purchase across the UL’s two demand-driven acquisition (DDA) schemes. Cambridge readers are as eclectic as ever in their interests: thanks to their activity, we now own ebooks about (amongst others) pathological lying, Schubert’s instrumental music, and contemporary American climate fiction. There remain nearly 8,500 unowned titles available across Ebook Central and JSTOR, with more being added each week.

A selection of recently published titles which we have acquired in perpetuity through the DDAs can be seen below (click here to skip to the list of iDiscover links). As ever, if you have any questions, please do get in touch with the English Collections team.

• Appalachian Ecocriticism and the Paradox of Place
• A Bastard Kind of Reasoning : William Blake and Geometry
• The Biocultural Consequences of Contact in Mexico: Five Centuries of Change
• Bloodstained Narratives : The Giallo Film in Italy and Abroad
• Blues on Stage : The Blues Entertainment Industry in The 1920s
• Bridging Worlds : Poetry and Philosophy in the Works of Immanuel of Rome
• Brutal Campaign : How the 1988 Election Set the Stage for Twenty-First-Century American Politics
• A Different Trek : Radical Geographies of Deep Space Nine
• Distancing Representations in Transgender Film : Identification, Affect, and the Audience
• Dreamers and Schemers : A Political History of Australia
• Jakarta : City of a Thousand Dimensions
• Lively Cities : Reconfiguring Urban Ecology
• The Political Economy of Distributism : Property, Liberty, and the Common Good
• Queer Imaginings : On Writing and Cinematic Friendship
• Reading Pleasures : Everyday Black Living in Early America
• Solidarity Across the Americas : The Puerto Rican Nationalist Party and Anti-Imperialism

UL DDA schemes in the 2022-23 academic year

The 2022-23 academic year saw a marked increase in activity across the UL’s two demand-driven acquisition (DDA) ebook schemes: overall, 1333 ebooks were purchased this way, up from 1190 in the previous academic year. The most popular publisher over the course of the year was State University of New York Press, with 65 titles purchased; they were followed by Indiana University Press (59), and then McGill-Queen’s University Press and University of North Carolina Press (47 apiece). There are currently over 8000 unowned ebooks available to Cambridge users by way of these two schemes, and more are added every week, covering everything from Anglophone Caribbean fiction to British veterans of the Napoleonic Wars to Schubert’s instrumental music.

A selection of ebooks which we now own permanently as a result of user activity in July can be seen below (click here to skip to the list of iDiscover links). If you have any questions about the DDA schemes, do get in touch with the English Collections team (engcc@lib.cam.ac.uk).

• Cannibalizing Queer : Brazilian Cinema from 1970 to 2015
• Christian Petzold : Interviews
• Feminists Reclaim Mentorship : An Anthology
• Genetic Joyce : Manuscripts and the Dynamics of Creation
• The Heresies of Jan Patočka : Phenomenology, History, and Politics
• Let This Radicalize You : Organizing and the Revolution of Reciprocal Care
• Liturgy of Change : Rhetorics of the Civil Rights Mass Meeting
• Otherwise Than the Binary : New Feminist Readings in Ancient Philosophy and Culture
• A Planetary Avant-Garde : Experimental Literature Networks and the Legacy of Iberian Colonialism
• Vertical Grammar of Parallelism in Biblical Hebrew
• We Are All Survivors : Verbal, Ritual, and Material Ways of Narrating Disaster and Recovery

UL DDA schemes: June update

By the standards of our normal DDA usage, June was a pretty quiet month, with a modest 85 titles triggered for purchase by Cambridge users (almost the same as June 2022, when 86 titles were purchased). However, the subject matter of the ebooks we now own as a result of DDA activity on Ebook Central and JSTOR was as varied as ever: whether your taste runs to the microgeographies of craft beer, nineteenth-century French novels, or the anthropology of precious minerals, the two DDA schemes have you covered.

A selection of a few titles which we now own in perpetuity can be seen below (click here to skip to the list of iDiscover links). As ever, if you have any questions, please do get in touch with the English collections team (engcc@lib.cam.ac.uk).

• Afterglow : Climate Fiction for Future Ancestors
• Creating Worlds Otherwise : Art, Collective Action, and (Post)Extractivism
• Memories of Africa : Home and Abroad in the United States
• Reading the Song of Songs with St. Thomas Aquinas
• Representing the Barrios : Culture, Politics, and Urban Poverty in Twentieth-Century Caracas
• Revival and Reconciliation : The Anglican Church and the Politics of Rwanda
• Salsa Consciente : Politics, Poetics, and Latinidad in the Meta-Barrio
• Saving Our Own Lives : A Liberatory Practice of Harm Reduction
• Solastalgia : An Anthology of Emotion in a Disappearing World
• Time and Power in Azraq Refugee Camp : A Nine-to-Five Emergency
• Unlikeable Female Characters : The Women Pop Culture Wants You to Hate
• Varieties of Russian Activism : State-Society Contestation in Everyday Life

UL DDA schemes: May update

May 2023 was only the second month in the current academic year where DDA usage was lower than the previous year: 121 titles were triggered for purchase by Cambridge users (down from 132 in May 2022). However, the range of subject areas covered by these purchases was as eclectic as ever: identity in graphic novels by Jewish women, a biography of the folk musician Buffy Sant-Marie and a study of education in prison all featured. The most popular publisher of the month was Indiana University Press (six titles triggered), followed by University of Wisconsin Press (five), and then University of Illinois Press and State University of New York Press (four apiece).

A selection of the ebooks which we now own outright as a result of activity in May can be seen below (click here to skip to the list of iDiscover links). There are around 7000 unpurchased titles available across the two DDA schemes, with more added every week. As ever, if you have any questions, please do get in touch with the English Collections team (engcc@lib.cam.ac.uk).

• Contemporary Philosophy for Maritime Archaeology : Flat Ontologies, Oceanic Thought, and the Anthropocene
• A Decolonizing Ear : Documentary Film Disrupts the Archive
• Eloquent Images : Evangelisation, Conversion and Propaganda in the Global World of the Early Modern Period
• The Lyric Essay as Resistance : Truth from the Margins
• Ovid’s “Heroides” and the Augustan Principate
• The Politics of the Marvel Cinematic Universe
• Porcelain for the Emperor : Manufacture and Technocracy in Qing China
• Predatory Economies : The Sanema and the Socialist State in Contemporary Amazonia
• Rogues in the Postcolony : Narrating Extraction and Itinerancy in India
• True Tracks : Respecting Indigenous Knowledge and Culture
• Urban Climate Justice : Theory, Praxis, Resistance
• Wandering Women : Urban Ecologies of Italian Feminist Filmmaking

UL DDA schemes: April update

Another month, another crop of ebooks which we now own outright as a result of DDA (demand-driven acquisition) activity. In April, Cambridge users triggered the purchase of 125 titles (up from 113 in the same month last year), across subjects as various as food Instagram, Abraham Lincoln’s early years, and stringed instrument making. Indiana University Press was the most popular publisher, with ten ebooks purchased, followed by the University of North Carolina Press (eight ebooks) and State University of New York Press (six).

A selection of the newly owned titles can be seen below (click here to skip to a list of iDiscover links). As ever, if you have any questions, please do get in touch with the English Collections team.

• Ain’t I an Anthropologist : Zora Neale Hurston Beyond the Literary Icon
• Enclaves of Exception : Special Economic Zones and Extractive Practices in Nigeria
• Fighting Unemployment in Twentieth-Century Chile
• French B Movies : Suburban Spaces, Universalism, and the Challenge of Hollywood
• Indigenous Theology and the Western Worldview : A Decolonized Approach to Christian Doctrine
• Making Sense in Common : A Reading of Whitehead in Times of Collapse
• Mouths of Rain : An Anthology of Black Lesbian Thought
• Music in Disney’s Animated Features : Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs to The Jungle Book
• The Near-Death of the Author : Creativity in the Internet Age
• Prison Life Writing : Conversion and the Literary Roots of the U. S. Prison System
• Race in the Crucible of War: African American Servicemen and the War in Vietnam
• Segregation Made Them Neighbors : An Archaeology of Racialization in Boise, Idaho
• Up Against the Law: Radical Lawyers and Social Movements, 1960s–1970s
• What’s Missing? : Collecting and Exhibiting Europe
• Women Reformers of Early Modern Europe : Profiles, Texts, and Contexts
• A World Away : The British Package Holiday Boom, 1950-1974

UL DDA schemes: March updates

March saw 128 ebooks triggered for permanent purchase by Cambridge users (up from 111 in March 2022: so far this academic year, there have been 174 more ebooks purchased as a result of DDA activity than in the equivalent timeframe last year). Whether tastes ran to a study of Irish crime fiction, a look at the representation of motherhood in cinema, or an examination of early twentieth century Chinese masculinity, the UL’s two DDA schemes (JSTOR and Ebook Central) had readers covered. The most popular publisher was State University of New York Press, with seven titles purchased, followed by Harrassowitz, McGill-Queen’s University Press, University of North Carolina Press, and University of Toronto Press, with six titles apiece.

A selection of the works which we now own in perpetuity can be seen below (click here to skip to the list of iDiscover links). If you have any questions, please do get in touch with the English Collections team.

• Consent in the Presence of Force : Sexual Violence and Black Women’s Survival in Antebellum New Orleans
• Embodying Modernity : Race, Gender, and Fitness Culture in Brazil
• Hugo Grotius, Annals of the War in the Low Countries
• It’s Not Free Speech : Race, Democracy, and the Future of Academic Freedom
• New Energies : A History of Energy Transitions in Europe and North America
• Passions for Birds : Science, Sentiment, and Sport
• The Politics of Musical Time : Expanding Songs and Shrinking Markets in Bengali Devotional Performance
• Reconfiguring the Museum : The Politics of Digital Display
• A Serpentine Gesture : John Ashbery’s Poetry and Phenomenology
• Taking China to the World : The Cultural Production of Modernity
• Territories of Faith : Religion, Urban Planning and Demographic Change in Post-War Europe
• Yiddish Lives On : Strategies of Language Transmission

UL DDA schemes: February update

February saw a slight rise in activity across the UL’s two DDA (demand-driven acquisition) ebook schemes, with 135 titles purchased as a result of user activity (up from 130 in the same month last year). As per normal, the titles triggered were an eclectic bunch: a handbook on how to conduct focus groups, a history of Canadian comics and graphic novels, and a cultural encyclopedia of chocolate all featured. The most popular publisher was Northwestern University Press, with an impressive 14 ebooks purchased, followed by University of North Carolina Press (9 ebooks) and State University of New York Press (8).

A selection of the works which we now own in perpetuity can be seen below (click here to skip to the list of iDiscover links). If you have any questions, please do get in touch with the English Collections team.

• Archaeology on the Threshold : Studies in the Processes of Change
• Borges and Kafka, Bolaño and Bloom : Latin American Authors and the Western Canon
• Cross-Border Cosmopolitans : The Making of a Pan-African North America
• Digital (in)justice in the Smart City
• Fame and Fandom : Functioning On and Offline
• Flames from the Earth : A Novel from the Lódz Ghetto
• The Idea of Indian Literature : Gender, Genre, and Comparative Method
• The Medieval Mind of C. S. Lewis : How Great Books Shaped a Great Mind
• Music-Making in U. S. Prisons : Listening to Incarcerated Voices
• Nature’s Broken Clocks : Reimagining Time in the Face of the Environmental Crisis
• Theorizing Colonial Cinema : Reframing Production, Circulation, and Consumption of Film in Asia
• Women in Ancient Egypt : Revisiting Power, Agency, and Autonomy

UL DDA schemes: January update

115 ebooks were triggered for purchase across the UL’s two Demand-Driven Acquisition ebook schemes (JSTOR and Ebook Central) in January: the one title acquired as a result of this activity, Rethinking Frank Lloyd Wright : History, Reception, Preservation, is so new that it’s not due out as a print book until March! Topics of interest to Cambridge readers this month included the philosophy of coffee tasting, the diary of a 19th-century missionary, and caste and gender in Indian literature; the most popular publishers were Indiana University Press (seven titles purchased), followed by University of Illinois Press and Northwestern University Press (five titles apiece).

A selection of ebooks which we now own outright can be seen below (click here to skip to the list of iDiscover links). If you have any questions, please do get in touch with the English Collections team.

• Animals in Our Days : A Book of Stories
• Anne Spencer Between Worlds
• The Common Camp : Architecture of Power and Resistance in Israel–Palestine
• Embracing the Void : Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred
• Fantastic Cities : American Urban Spaces in Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror
• Global Labor Migration : New Directions
• Painting Amara West : The Technology and Experience of Colour in New Kingdom Nubia
• Without the State : Self-Organization and Political Activism in Ukraine
• World Christianity and Interfaith Relations

JSTOR and Ebook Central DDAs: December update

December is normally relatively quiet in terms of DDA (demand-driven acquisition) activity, but December 2022 was busier than usual: 109 titles were triggered for permanent purchase (up from 84 in the same month in 2021), with a particular spike with the JSTOR DDA in the week leading up to Christmas. I can only assume that readers were busy downloading books to read for the festive period. (Not that their reading matter would have been particularly festive in nature: titles purchased included a cultural encyclopedia of lost cities and civilizations, a study of refugee diaspora organisations, and a book about the work of war artists). The most popular publishers were Fortress Press and the perenially popular State University of New York Press, wth seven titles apiece.

A selection of the titles we now own outright as a result of user activity can be seen below (click here to skip to a list of titles with iDiscover links). Please do get in touch with the English Collections team (engcc@lib.cam.ac.uk) if you have any questions.

• Ancient Foodways : Integrative Approaches to Understanding Subsistence and Society
• Black Scholars Matter : Visions, Struggles, and Hopes in Africana Biblical Studies
• Books against Tyranny: Catalan Publishers under Franco
• From Wallflowers to Bulletproof Families : The Power of Disability in Young Adult Narratives
• A History of Italian Fascist Culture, 1922-1943
• Movie Workers : The Women Who Made British Cinema
• Painting Architecture : Jiehua in Yuan China, 1271-1368
• Queer Silence : On Disability and Rhetorical Absence
• Spatializing Authoritarianism