Collections update: Oxford Very Short Introductions Online

We are pleased to announce that the popular Very Short Introductions collection has been renewed for another year. The collection of nearly 900 DRM-free ebooks provides students and researchers with entry points into a wide array of subjects ranging from Agatha Christie to particle physics, authoritarianism to the history of childhood, behavioural economics to miracles. The Introductions are written by experts in their fields across the Arts, Humanities, Social Sciences and STEMM.

Click here to browse the full collection on Oxford Academic. There is a Subject filter in the menu bar on the left of the page if you would like to focus in on a particular area.

The link to the Oxford Very Short Introductions homepage can be found on our ebooks@cambridge LibGuide and records for individual titles are added to iDiscover.

Please do get in touch if you have any questions about the Very Short Introductions collection. Email us at ebooks@lib.cam.ac.uk.

Please see below for a list of titles published in 2025:

• Oral History: A Very Short Introduction
• Henry David Thoreau: A Very Short Introduction
• Jorge Luis Borges: A Very Short Introduction
• Alexander Hamilton: A Very Short Introduction
• Agatha Christie: A Very Short Introduction
• George Eliot: A Very Short Introduction
• The Catholic Reformation: A Very Short Introduction
• Mary Wollstonecraft: A Very Short Introduction
• Sophocles: A Very Short Introduction
• Anthony Trollope: A Very Short Introduction
• Cryptography: A Very Short Introduction (2nd edn)
• Symbiosis: A Very Short Introduction
• Futurism: A Very Short Introduction
• Sustainability: A Very Short Introduction
• Meaning: A Very Short Introduction
• Cancer: A Very Short Introduction (2nd edn)
• Psycholinguistics: A Very Short Introduction
• Toleration: A Very Short Introduction

Oxford University Press: Law books migration

This week (Tuesday 13^th August) the following Oxford University Press products will be migrating to the Oxford Academic platform:

• Oxford Legal Research Library
• Oxford Scholarly Authorities on International Law

Please note that there will be no changes to Law Trove.

The titles in these collections have already been added to the Oxford Academic platform to sit alongside Law books from Oxford Scholarship Online, Oxford Handbooks Online and more. From Tuesday 13th August, access on the old platforms will cease and the links in iDiscover ebook records will redirect to Oxford Academic. This should be a seamless process, and the ebooks team will be checking on the day, but please do contact us at ebooks@lib.cam.ac.uk if you have any questions or if you encounter any problems.

Please see this webpage to browse all Law book titles now available on Oxford Academic. You can filter the results by collection if you only wish to see titles from Oxford Scholarly Authorities on International Law or the four modules in Oxford Legal Research Library (Financial and Banking Law, International Commercial Arbitration, International Commercial Law, Private International Law).

You can also visit the homepages for Oxford Scholarly Authorities on International Law and Oxford Legal Research Library to browse available titles in these collections.

• Homepage for Oxford Scholarly Authorities on International Law
• Homepage for Oxford Legal Research Library: Financial and Banking Law
• Homepage for Oxford Legal Research Library: International Commercial Arbitration
• Homepage for Oxford Legal Research Library: International Commercial Law
• Homepage for Oxford Legal Research Library: Private International Law

The main A-Z Databases has been updated with the new links and with separate entries for each of the four Oxford Legal Research Library modules.

As mentioned above, do get in touch if you have any questions or if you encounter any access or linking problems. Write to us at ebooks@lib.cam.ac.uk

Problem affecting PDF downloads on Oxford Legal Research Library (and a workaround)

Currently there is an issue affecting a small handful of ebooks on the Oxford Legal Research Library platform, which is preventing PDF downloads. After the user selects the “Download PDF” icon, the page tries to load and after a period displays the following error message:

This page isn’t working

olrl.ouplaw.com didn’t send any data.

ERR_EMPTY_RESPONSE

Oxford University Press is aware of the issue. They report that the issue will be fixed in due course, but there may be a delay before they can do this.

In the meantime, there is a workaround. Please try the following steps if the PDF button is not working on Oxford Legal Research Library:

1. Click on the “Print” icon from the icon menu, which is located on the right side of the screen, below the Oxford Legal Research Library header.

2. Select “Print” from the browser drop-down menu in the right-hand corner of the screen.

3. The print dialogue box will open. Choose the option “Save as PDF”.

We are sorry for any inconvenience caused by this temporary error. Please contact the ebooks team at ebooks@lib.cam.ac.uk if you have further problems downloading PDFs from Oxford Legal Research Library, or if you experience the same issue on other OUP ebook platforms.

Oxford Scholarship Online EBA: titles purchased for 2021

The UL has had an evidence-based acquisition scheme with Oxford University Press, using their Oxford Scholarship Online platform, since 2015. Each year, we pay a deposit, and are granted access to titles on OSO in subject areas in the arts and humanities; at the end of the term of the agreement, we then use the deposit to select a number of ebooks for outright purchase.

We renewed this scheme over the summer, and will continue to have access to the EBA titles on Oxford Scholarship Online until at least the end of next June. We’ve now finished our selection of ebooks to buy with last year’s deposit, and we have been able to purchase 150 in total. Thanks go to all the faculty and departmental librarians who sent in suggestions of titles which it would be particularly useful to own in perpetuity! A selection of recent (2020 and 2021) ebooks to which we now have permanent, unlimited and DRM-free access can be seen below.

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• Alexander Pope in the Making
• Bearing Witness While Black : African Americans, Smartphones, and the New Protest #Journalism
• Born to Write : Literary Families and Social Hierarchy in Early Modern France
• Classicisms in the Black Atlantic
• Colonial and Decolonial Linguistics : Knowledges and Epistemes
• Guru Gobind Singh, 1666-1708 : Master of the White Hawk
• Imperialism and the Developing World : How Britain and the United Sates Shaped the Global Periphery
• Maya in the Bhagavata Purana : Human Suffering and Divine Play
• Pascal : Reasoning and Belief

New titles are added to the OSO platform each month, so the number of titles we can access keeps growing. If you have any questions about the scheme, please get in touch with the English Collections team (engcc@lib.cam.ac.uk).

Oxford Scholarship Online: new subject areas added!

The ebooks@cambridge team is delighted to announce that access to Oxford Scholarship Online, funded by the UL’s Collections and Academic Liaison budget, has been renewed for another year. Under the scheme, Cambridge users have access to thousands of Oxford University Press ebooks (both backlist and frontlist), and at the end of each twelve-month period it is possible to purchase perpetual access to a selection of titles. You can find more information on how the scheme works here.

This year, a number of new subject modules have been added to our agreement, three of them (Biology, Computing and Psychology) funded by STEMM libraries. The full list of collections to which we now have access are:

• Archaeology *new for 2021*
• Biology *new for 2021*
• Business and Management
• Classical Studies
• Computing *new for 2021*
• Economics and Finance
• Education *new for 2021*
• History
• Linguistics
• Literature
• Music
• Philosophy
• Political Science
• Psychology *new for 2021*
• Religion
• Sociology

There are not yet records in iDiscover for the Archaeology, Computing and Education modules, but these will be added as soon as possible. In the meantime, they can be accessed directly via the OSO platform. (It’s worth noting that very recently published titles in all collections may not appear in iDiscover immediately – there is generally a delay of a few weeks between their release and there being a record for them – so, if you’re looking for a new Oxford University Press book, it’s always worth going direct to the platform to check if it’s available there.)

A selection of recently published titles (released in June) can be seen here:

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• Bioprinting : To Make Ourselves Anew
• Imperial Women of Rome : Power, Gender, Context
• India and the Silk Roads : The History of a Trading World
• The Elusive Everyday in the Fiction of Marilynne Robinson
• The Transformative Self : Personal Growth, Narrative Identity, and the Good Life
• Voice and Inequality : Poverty and Political Participation in Latin American Democracies

If you have any questions or comments, please contact the ebooks@cambridge team.