Collections update: Wiley AI 2024 and Now AI 2025

We are very pleased to announce that Cambridge University Libraries now has access to two ebook collections, Wiley AI 2024 and Now AI 2025, both hosted on IEEE Xplore. These collections, which together feature over 90 recently published titles, cover a range of topics in relation to artificial intelligence, such as healthcare, agriculture, augmented reality, and coding. New titles will also be added to the Now AI 2025 collection as they are published throughout the rest of this year.

Records for the titles which are already published are available to search on iDiscover. The Wiley collection is browsable on IEEE’s platform, whilst the Now collection is searchable on IEEE by using the advanced search function and filtering the publisher to ‘Now’ and the year to ‘2025’ – the titles we have access to will be indicated by an unlocked green padlock.

Please see below for a selection of the new titles showcasing the range of ebooks available, with hyperlinks to their contents on the IEEE platform beneath the images.

• AI + The New Human Frontier: Reimagining the Future of Time, Trust + Truth
• Fog Computing for Intelligent Cloud IoT Systems
• Spatial Computing: An AI-Driven Business Revolution
• The Reign of Botnets: Defending Against Abuses, Bots and Fraud on the Internet
• Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality in Special Education
• IRREPLACEABLE: The Art of Standing Out in the Age of Artificial Intelligence
• AI for Good: Applications in Sustainability, Humanitarian Action, and Health
• Advances in Fuzzy-Based Internet of Medical Things (IoMT)

If you have any questions or would like to know more about the collections please do get in touch with the ebooks@cambridge team.

Open Access monographs: Open Book Publishers, 2025-2028

Since 2015 Cambridge University Libraries have supported Open Book Publishers (OBP), an independent open access academic press that publishes peer-reviewed monongraphs, edited collections, textbooks, and critical translations, via OPB’s Library Membership Programme. We are pleased to announce that we have recently renewed our support for a further three years, 2025-2028.

OPB are a non-profit scholar-led enterprise, based in Cambridge UK and led by academics who are commited to making high-quality research available for all readers. All their books are freely available in open access formats (PDF, HTML and sometimes XML), as well as in paperback, hardback, and EPUB. OBP do not charge their authors to publish with them and their authors retain full copyright. The publisher relies on the support of academic libraries to provide one of their four main revenue streams to cover their costs, the others being sales, title grants and donations and non-standard production charges.

OBP publishes 50-60 titles a year across Arts, Humanities, Social Sciences and STEMM subjects. All of these titles are published open access, which means they are available to read and reuse for free in their entirety, without any restriction on who can access them.

Here is a smal selection of recently added titles which showcase the range of titles available. A list of the selected titles, as well as hyperlinks to their contents on openbookpublishers.com, can be found below the images.

Oral Poetry

A Field Guide to Cross-Cultural Research on Childhood Learning

Color, Healthcare and Bioethics

Uncovering European Private Law: a student handbook

Bioethics: A Coursebook

Improvising Otherwise: A Decolonial Feminist Approach to Improvisation in Early Modern English Culture

The full book catalogue is available from here and details of forthcoming titles are available from this link. It’s worth noting that OBP publish various book series, and also textbooks in subjects such as Classics, Economics, Environmental Sciences, Mathematics and Philosophy. Many OBP books have been awarded prizes for the quality of their scholarship and the innovation of their presentation, please click for a list of titles with further details.

Discovery and use

Title records for OBP books are searchable in iDiscover (there is always a slight lag on very newly published titles). It is worth noting that if users follow the publisher-direct links within the records provided directly by the publisher (“Full text available at: Open Book Publishers”) there is a choice to download book titles in PDF, XML, EPUB, and HTML formats (where available). Users will see the guidance if clicking into the full iDiscover records as shown in the example screenshot below;

Please do get in contact with the ebooks@cambridge team at ebooks@lib.cam.ac.uk if you have any questions concerning OBP titles.

Open Access monographs: MIT Press Direct To Open 2025

The University of Cambridge continues to support MIT Press’s Direct To Open (D2O) for 2025. Cambridge University Libraries originally signed up for the scheme in 2022 and this was renewed for a further 12 months at the end of 2024. Our support, along with over 300 other participating libraries is enabling MIT to publish all 80 books earmarked for this model as Open Access over the coming year.

The 2025 titles will begin publishing in February and a title list of all D2O published books including the Spring/Summer 2025 is now available.

As a participating institution we continue to have access to @ 2,300 ebooks from the MIT Press backlist for the period of the subscription in titles ranging across all disciplines. Records for the backlist collection as well as for all the Open Access titles can be searched for in iDiscover. Newly published title records are added regularly.

The publisher states; “Launched in 2021, D2O is an innovative sustainable framework for open access monographs that shifts publishing from a solely market-based, purchase model where individuals and libraries buy single eBooks, to a collaborative, library-supported open access model. D2O’s particular advantage is that it enables [MIT] to provide open access to its entire list of scholarly books at scale, embargo-free, during each funding cycle….all MIT Press monograph authors have the opportunity for their work to be published open access with equal support to traditionally underserved and underfunded disciplines in the social sciences and humanities.”

Key statistics

• 321 – number of open access books funded through D2O to date
• 659,453 – total # of times published D2O books have been read on the MIT Press platform
• 12.74% / 54.78% / 32.48% – % of humanities/social sciences/STEM in D2O

Recently published D2O titles include;

• Digital Social Reading: Sharing Fiction in the Twenty-First Century
• Macroeconomic Modeling: The Cowles Commission Approach
• Playframes: How Do We Know We Are Playing?
• Toy Theory: Technology and Imagination in Play
• Intellivision: How a Videogame System Battled Atari and Almost Bankrupted Barbie
• Computing Legacies: Digital Cultures of Simulation
• The Line: AI and the Future of Personhood
• The Connectivity of Things: Network Cultures since 1832
• A Just Transition for All: Workers and Communities for a Carbon-Free Future

You can click on this link to browse all the D2O published titles on the MIT ebooks platform.

Please do get in touch with the ebooks team at ebooks@lib.cam.ac.uk if you have any questions.

Collections update: 350+ new Taylor & Francis ebooks now available

Photo by Beau Carpenter on Unsplash

We are delighted to announce that Cambridge users now have permanent access to a further 350+ in-demand titles on Taylor & Francis.

In 2023-24, Cambridge subscribed for one year to the Taylor & Francis STEMM netBASE EBA scheme, which provided access to a wide array of STEMM content on the platform.

An EBA (Evidence Based Acquisition) scheme entails paying a subscription fee to open up access to content on an ebook platform for a period of one year, at the end of which period the subscribing institution can make a selection of popular and well-used titles up to a certain value that they can then keep in perpetuity.

Please see below for a sample of the popular STEMM titles that were selected and are now available with permanent DRM-free access. The hyperlinked book titles will take you to the relevant ebooks on the Taylor & Francis platform.

Version 1.0.0

• Artificial Intelligence in Higher Education: A Practical Approach
• Core Principles of Special and General Relativity
• Evolving Neural Crest Cells
• Fundamentals of Crystallography, Powder X-ray Diffraction, and Transmission Electron Microscopy for Materials Scientists
• Handbook of Astrobiology
• Handbook of Meta-Analysis
• Handbook of Refugee Health: For Healthcare Professionals and Humanitarians Providing Care to Forced Migrants
• Manual of Forensic Taphonomy
• Pharmacology Mind Maps for Medical Students and Allied Health Professionals
• Producing Music
• Railway Transportation Systems: Design, Construction and Operation
• Small Animal Medicine and Metabolic Disorders: Self-Assessment Color Review (2nd edition)
• Systems Thinker’s Toolbox
• The Duke Elder Exam of Ophthalmology: A Comprehensive Guide for Success
• The Physics of Phonons

We also had the opportunity to acquire a further selection of in-demand Taylor & Francis titles. These newly acquired ebooks include a range of STEMM titles, as well as popular titles in the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences.

• A Museum Studies Approach to Heritage
• Different Engines: Media Technologies From Latin America
• Environment: Critical Essays in Human Geography
• Imperialism: Critical Concepts in Historical Studies: volume one
• Imperialism: Critical Concepts in Historical Studies: volume two
• Imperialism: Critical Concepts in Historical Studies: volume three
• Technology Ethics: A Philosophical Introduction and Readings
• The Biographical Turn: Lives in history
• The Location of Culture
• The New Social Theory Reader (2nd edition)
• Theories and Origins of the Modern Police
• The Routledge Handbook of Mega-Sporting Events and Human Rights
• The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Public Health
• The Turing Test Argument

Please do get in touch with the ebooks team at ebooks@lib.cam.ac.uk if you have any questions at all.

Collections update: Springer STEMM EBAs 2024-25 & Springer Synthesis 2024

Renewal: Biomedical & Life Sciences, Engineering, and Mathematics & Statistics EBAs

“Molecule Virus Bug” Image by Pete Linforth from Pixabay

We are pleased to announce that we have renewed our three popular Springer ebook EBA subscriptions (Biomedical & Life Sciences, Engineering, and Mathematics & Statistics) for another year. This “rolling” subscription model covers the four most recent years (2021-24, over 8,600 titles), so that Cambridge users will always have access to the most up-to-date research, conference publications and teaching works in these collections, including new content as it’s published through the rest of 2024. All available title records are searchable in iDiscover.

These subscriptions are also Evidence-Based Acquisition (EBA) schemes, which means that Cambridge STEMM Librarians use the full annual subscription fees to purchase perpetual access to the most popular and useful titles from the subscriptions. Subject Librarians selected 155 titles from our previous years subscription and these are now permanently owned outright. Please see below for examples of recently purchased ebooks across the three subject areas. The titles are hyperlinked and will take you to the relevant book on the SpringerLink platform.

• Lectin in Host Defense Against Microbial Infections
• The Ecology of Invasions by Animals and Plants
• The Art of Theoretical Biology
• Environment, Climate, Plant and Vegetation Growth
• New World Tarantulas
• Geotechnics for Sustainable Infrastructure Development
• Engineering Assets and Public Infrastructures in the Age of Digitalization
• Future Trends in Biomedical and Health Informatics and Cybersecurity in Medical Devices
• Advances in Ergonomics in Design
• Wood & Fire Safety: Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Wood & Fire Safety 2020
• Algebraic Geometry I: Schemes
• Explorations in Complex Functions
• Geometric Analysis: In Honor of Gang Tian’s 60th Birthday
• Deep Reinforcement Learning: Fundamentals, Research and Applications
• Galois Cohomology and Class Field Theory

Purchase: Springer Synthesis Collection of Technology 2024

The Synthesis 2024 collection has been purchased in perpetuity; this adds to the previously purchased annual collections and coverage now spans publication years 2005-2024.

To quote from the publishers’ website;

“The Synthesis Collection of Technology provides coverage of leading edge topics across the fields of Engineering and Computer Science. Books in this collection are based on techniques, reviews and course notes and defined as “lectures”. These are short, focused books, consisting of around 75-150 pages, bridging the gap between a journal article and an average book. These books tend to have rapid development cycles, publishing research on hot topics as soon as these emerge. Besides emerging topics, Synthesis books also contain principles, fundamentals, methods, models and applications containing practical, accessible information on recent innovations in fast-moving research areas.”

“AI generated network” Image by Pete Linforth from Pixabay

All records are available in iDiscover. Please see below for a sample list of titles from the 2024 collection (there are approximately 115 new titles being added). The links will take you directly to the relevant ebook on SpringerLink:

• The Traveling Salesman Problem
• The Future of Long Covid: A Threatcasting Approach
• AI Chatbots: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly
• Artificial Intelligence in Vision-Based Structural Health Monitoring
• The Role of Fuels in Transforming Energy End-Use in Buildings and Industrial Processes
• Lifelong and Continual Learning Dialogue Systems
• Scaling Up: How Data Curation Can Help Address Key Issues in Qualitative Data Reuse and Big Social Research
• Quality and Lean Six Sigma for Engineering Technicians

As ever, please do get in touch with the ebooks team if you have any questions about any Springer ebook content. Or, indeed, anything at all related to ebooks! We’re always very happy to help. Write to: ebooks@lib.cam.ac.uk 

Collections update: IEEE Princeton University Press STEMM Collection

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 collection can be found directly on the IEEE Xplore platform, the ebooks@cambridge LibGuide, or through individual titles searches on iDiscover.  

Some of the most popular titles include: 

• The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger – Marc Levinson 
• “You Are Not Expected to Understand This”: How 26 Lines of Code Changed the World – Kelly Chudler; Ellen Ullman
• Breaking the Social Media Prism: How to Make Our Platforms Less Polarizing – Chris Bail
• The Scientist’s Guide to Writing, 2nd Edition: How to Write More Easily and Effectively throughout Your Scientific Career – Stephen B. Heard
• Visual Differential Geometry and Forms: A Mathematical Drama in Five Acts – Tristan Needham
• Advanced Classical Electromagnetism – Robert Wald 

For any questions, problems, or content recommendations, please contact the ebooks@cambridge team. 

New ebook collection: APA PsycBooks (via EBSCOhost)

Image by David Sánchez-Medina Calderón from Pixabay

We are pleased to announce that Cambridge University students and researchers now have subscription access to APA PsycBooks (via EBSCOhost) from the American Psychological Association (APA). This database provides access to 69,000 full-text, DRM-free chapters from over 4600 peer-reviewed scholarly and professional Psychology books, including reference works. The collection is updated monthly and ranges from the newest APA publications in the field to historical works dating back as far as the 1600s. It will be a valuable teaching and research resource for all branches of Psychology, as well as Clinical Medicine, Education, the History and Philosophy of Science, Sociology and more.

Records for all 4600 plus books are now available in iDiscover with more to be added as the collection is updated. Users can also access the PsycBooks homepage via the “PsycBooks (via EBSCOHost)” entry in the A-Z Databases.

APA PsycBooks homepage. Click on the image to enlarge.

From the homepage users can search for specific topics, narrowing searches by publication year, publication date, age group, population group and intended audience. The resulting chapter-level search results can be refined even further by publication, subject, publisher, language and more. Each of the 69,000 plus chapters is fully and expertly indexed allowing users to easily find the specific content they need.

Example of a chapter listing on APA PsycBooks. Click on the image to enlarge.

Notable titles in the database include the APA Handbook of Psychotherapy (two volumes)

From APA: This indispensable handbook captures the most representative ways in which psychotherapists characterize the driving forces behind their foundational therapeutic approaches. The 50 chapters represent the latest thinking and evidence on the most relevant topics across the “big four” psychotherapy domains of theory, research, practice, and training.

• Volume 1: Theory-driven practice and disorder-driven practice
• Volume 2: Evidence-based practice, practice-based evidence, and contextual participant-driven practice

Other highlights include:

• new releases from all titles in the APA Handbooks in Psychology® series, including Psychotherapy (see above), Research Methods, Neuropsychology, and Adolescent and Young Adult Development
• online access to the APA/Oxford University Press Encyclopedia of Psychology (8 volumes)
• APA Thesaurus of Psychological Index Terms®, which can be found via the menu bar at the top of the homepage

APA Thesaurus of Psychological Index Terms®. Click on the image to enlarge.

The database includes classic texts (many out-of-print and hard to find) and older historical works, offering an insight into developments in the field of psychology over the course of history up to the present day. One of the older works in the collection is A treatise of the passions and faculties of the soul of man, with the several dignities and corruptions thereunto belonging (1656) by Edward Reynolds, bishop of Norwich. His writings range across such hefty subjects as the soul, errors, anger, shame, fear, self-confidence, joy, hope and love. Here is an example chapter:

Of other causes of delight, unexpectedness of a good, strength of desire, imagination, imitation, fitness and accommodation. Of the effects of this passion, reparation of nature, dilatation. Thirst in noble objects, satiety in baser, whetting of industry. A timorous unbelief

For more current writings on psychology, please see below for a sample of available titles from the APA 2024 collection. The hyperlinked titles in the list will take you to the corresponding works on EBSCOhost.

• A Psychological Approach to Diagnosis: Using the ICD-11 as a Framework
• Child Development at the Intersection of Emotion and Cognition
• Deliberate Practice in Psychedelic-Assisted Therapy
• How to Mix Methods: A Guide to Sequential, Convergent, and Experimental Research Designs
• Practical Ethics for Psychologists: A Positive Approach, Fourth Edition
• Psychological Perspectives on Human Trafficking: Theory, Research, Prevention, and Intervention
• Structural Analysis of Social Behavior (SASB): A Primer for Clinical Use
• Teleconsultation in Schools: A Guide to Collaborative Practice
• The Complete Researcher: A Practical Guide for Graduate Students and Early Career Professionals
• The Impostor Phenomenon: Psychological Research, Theory, and Interventions

We hope that you will find the APA PsycBooks database a useful resource. Please do get in touch if you have any questions or issues with access. Write to us at ebooks@lib.cam.ac.uk.

Springer EBA updates – includes new Engineering subscription for 2023-24!

Renewal: Mathematics & Statistics and Biomedical & Life Sciences EBAs

We are pleased to announce that we have renewed our two popular Springer ebook subscriptions (Mathematics & Statistics and Biomedical & Life Sciences) for another year. This “rolling” subscription model covers the four most recent years (2020-23), so that Cambridge users will always have access to the most up-to-date research, conference publications and teaching works in these collections, including new content as it is published through the rest of 2023.

These subscriptions are also Evidence-Based Acquisition (EBA) schemes, which means that Cambridge STEMM Librarians use the full annual subscription fees to purchase perpetual access to the most popular and useful titles from the subscriptions. Subject Librarians are currently selecting titles from our previous year’s subscription, which covered the years 2019-22. 

New: Springer Engineering EBA

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

We are delighted to announce that we have recently added yet another subscription to our Springer EBA bow with the Springer Engineering collection! Over 5000 DRM-free Springer Engineering books and conference proceedings in the 2020-23 collections have now been opened up to Cambridge users. More new content will be made available throughout the rest of 2023 as it is published.

Please note that selected reference works are not included and will display as Preview Only, but the subscription covers the vast majority of recently published Engineering books available on the SpringerLink platform with a wealth of titles to suit a range of subdisciplines, including Artificial Intelligence, Computer Applications, Agriculture, Machine Learning, Biotechnology, Industrial and Production Engineering, Engineering Design, and many more. 

Users can filter by Content Type (Book, Chapter, Conference Proceeding, and Conference Paper), Discipline, Subdiscipline and Language via the menu bar on the left of the webpage.

The catalogue records are now available in iDiscover. More records will be added on a regular basis as newly published 2023 content becomes available on the Springer platform.

Please also see below for an example of recent works available through this new subscription. The titles are hyperlinked and will take you to the relevant book on the SpringerLink platform.

• Fundamentals of Railway Design
• Designing with the Wind: Climate-Derived Architecture
• Photonic Crystal and Its Applications for Next Generation Systems
• Processing-in-Memory for AI: From Circuits to Systems
• High Performance and Power Efficient Electrocardiogram Detectors

We hope that Cambridge Engineers will find this subscription a valuable addition to our existing Springer access.  

In Technology news, we can also let you know that the Morgan & Claypool purchased collections in Computer Science and Engineering have a new home now on SpringerLink, as part of the Springer Synthesis Collection of Technology collection. A separate blogpost about these collections will follow soon. 

As ever, please do get in touch with the ebooks team if you have any questions about the new Engineering collection, or any other Springer content. Or, indeed, anything at all related to ebooks! We’re always very happy to help. Write to: ebooks@lib.cam.ac.uk 

New resource: McGraw Hill’s AccessEngineering

Photo by ThisIsEngineering

Calling all Cambridge Engineers! Cambridge now has a one year subscription to McGraw Hill’s AccessEngineering platform until the end of July 2024.

This multi-format reference and teaching platform provides access to over 900 interdisciplinary engineering titles! Students can also make use of handy interactive learning tools, such as as data visualisation (DataVis), spreadsheets, videos, graphs & tables, solution walkthroughs, case studies and tutorials.

Students and researchers can read titles covering a wide range of subjects – from Civil Engineering, Computer Science and Environmental Engineering to Bioengineering, Mechanical Engineering and many more.

The 900+ ebooks are all searchable in iDiscover and include handbooks, textbooks and reference works. Available collections also include Schaum’s Outlines, Makerspace, Code Commentary, Business Skills and Exam Prep.

Users can also browse the platform to find relevant content. You can browse by learning tool (Videos, DataVis, Spreadsheets, etc.) or you can filter by Subject, Industry, Course Outline, and Codes & Standards Commentary.

We hope that you will find a wealth of useful research and teaching resources contained within this AccessEngineering subscription.

Please do get in touch with the ebooks team if you would like any further information. You can write to us at ebooks@lib.cam.ac.uk

New ebooks collection: Taylor and Francis STEMM netBASE eBooks

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:

• RNA, the Epicenter of Genetic Information
• Advanced Numerical Modelling of Wave Structure Interaction
• Fluid Balance, Hydration, and Athletic Performance
• Reliability and Safety of Cable-Supported Bridges
• Microbiomes of Extreme Environments: Biodiversity and Biotechnological Applications
• How to Write a PhD in Biological Sciences: A Guide for the Uninitiated
• Handbook of Astrobiology
• Cartoon Physics: A Graphic Novel Guide to Solving Physics Problems
• Advances in Nanopathology: From Vaccines to Food

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. 

Emily Perdue (ebooks@cambridge Library Assistant)