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

De Gruyter EBA renewal (2023)

I’m pleased to announce that the UL’s evidence-based (EBA) scheme with De Gruyter has been renewed for another calendar year. Funded jointly by the UL English and German budgets, it will give Cambridge readers access to approximately 114,500 titles in 2023. As well as the various De Gruyter imprints, there are nearly thirty partner presses (chiefly US-based) who participate in the EBA, such as Harvard, New York, and Texas University Press. A new partner press is Berghahn Books, whose content has started to be added to the platform (and appearing in iDiscover).

The EBA has now been running since 2016. With each renewal, we pay a deposit, and at the end of the period of the agreement, we are given the usage statistics and can select titles up to the value of the deposit, which we will then own in perpetuity, regardless of whether or not we continue with the EBA. Each year, we are generally able to purchase between 700 and 800 titles, all with unlimited and DRM-free access.

We will soon be starting this selection process for the past calendar year. A handful of titles purchased based on 2021 usage can be seen below (click here to skip to the list of iDiscover links). If you have any questions about the De Gruyter EBA, please do get in touch with the English Collections team (engcc@lib.cam.ac.uk).

• Bibliophilos : Books and Learning in the Byzantine World
• Distant Shores : Colonial Encounters on China’s Maritime Frontier
• The Form of Love : Poetry’s Quarrel with Philosophy
• Genesis and Validity : The Theory and Practice of Intellectual History
• Hans Sachs : Ein Handbuch
• Der Heilige Georg : Mittelhochdeutscher Text, Übersetzung, Kommentar und Materialien zur Stofftradition
• Histories of Racial Capitalism
• Mies van der Rohe Barcelona-Pavillon : Hundert Texte seit 1929
• Troubling Topics, Sacred Texts : Readings in Hebrew Bible, New Testament, and Qur’an

JSTOR and Ebook Central DDAs: November update

November saw another 150 titles purchased across the UL’s two DDA (demand-driven acquisition) schemes, on JSTOR and Ebook Central. As usual, Cambridge readers proved themselves to have the widest possible range of interests: ebooks which we now own include volumes on the sustainability of the drinks industry, the use of algorithms in education, and recent Taiwan cinema. The most popular publisher was McGill-Queen’s University Press, with eight titles triggered for purchase; second place went jointly to State University of New York Press, University of Minnesota Press, and University of North Carolina Press, with five titles apiece.

A selection of November titles can be seen below (click here to skip to a list of iDiscover links). Please do get in touch with the English Collections team (engcc@lib.cam.ac.uk) if you have any questions about the DDAs.

• Architecture of Life : Soviet Modernism and the Human Sciences
• Bandits and Liberals, Rebels and Saints : Latin America Since Independence
• Creating African Fashion Histories : Politics, Museums, and Sartorial Practices
• Disinformation and You : Identify Propaganda and Manipulation
• Examining Education Around the World
• The Georgetown Companion to Interreligious Studies
• The LGBTQ+ Comics Studies Reader : Critical Openings, Future Directions
• Real, Recent, or Replica : Precolumbian Caribbean Heritage As Art, Commodity, and Inspiration
• Rehearsing Revolutions : The Labor Drama Experiment and Radical Activism in the Early Twentieth Century
• Religion, Ethnonationalism, and Antisemitism in the Era of the Two World Wars
• Sound Work : Composition As Critical Technical Practice
• The Voice of Science : British Scientists on the Lecture Circuit in Gilded Age America

Brill ebook collections for 2023

I’m pleased to announce that the UL has purchased a number of 2023 ebook collections from Brill. We first started doing this back in 2014, replacing our many print standing orders by buying most of Brill’s subject collections. Over the course of the next year we will gradually gain permanent, DRM-free access to nearly 950 titles as they are released, in the following collections:

• Asian Studies
• Biblical Studies, Ancient Near East and Early Christianity
• Classical Studies
• Early Modern History and Modern History
• International Law (funded by the Squire Law Library)
• Language and Linguistics
• Late Antiquity and Medieval Studies
• Literature and Cultural Studies
• Middle East and Islamic Studies
• Religious Studies, Theology and Philosophy
• Social Sciences
• Schöningh and Fink: Early Modern and Modern History (funded by the UL German budget)
• Schöningh and Fink: Literature and Culture Studies (funded by the UL German budget)
• Schöningh and Fink: Religious Studies, Theology and Philosophy (funded by the UL German budget)

Records will be added to iDiscover every month, so there will sometimes be a short delay between a book being published and it displaying in the catalogue–it’s always worth checking the Brill platform if there’s a brand new title which you can’t find in iDiscover. If you have any questions, please do get in touch with the English Collections team (engcc@lib.cam.ac.uk).

New ebook collection: Stanford University Press 2023

Following on from our purchase of the Stanford University Press 2022 frontlist collection, I’m pleased to be able to announce that the the UL’s Collections and Academic Liaison has now purchased Stanford’s 2023 collection. We will have permanent, DRM-free (i.e. unlimited) access to c. 110 titles published by Stanford during the course of 2023, as well as retaining access to their 2000-2013 backlist (a collection of c. 1500 titles). These ebooks are all hosted on the De Gruyter platform, and records for new titles will be added as they are released.

A selection of some of the recently published titles in the 2022 collection can be seen below (click here to skip to a list of iDiscover links). Please do get in touch with the English Collections team (engcc@lib.cam.ac.uk) if you have any questions.

• American Graphic : Disgust and Data in Contemporary Literature
• Climate Change, Interrupted : Representation and the Remaking of Time
• The Culture Transplant : How Migrants Make the Economies They Move To a Lot Like the Ones They Left
• Digital Codicology : Medieval Books and Modern Labor
• The Ends of Paradise : Race, Extraction, and the Struggle for Black Life in Honduras
• Literary Mathematics: Quantitative Theory for Textual Studies
• Practicing Sectarianism : Archival and Ethnographic Interventions on Lebanon
• The Tropical Silk Road : The Future of China in South America
• The Vulgarity of Caste : Dalits, Sexuality, and Humanity in Modern India

JSTOR and Ebook Central DDAs: October update

Activity across the UL’s two DDA (demand-driven acquisition) schemes was busier than ever in October, with 138 titles triggered for purchase by readers, an increase of 50 from the same month last year. The most popular publishers were the usual suspects–State University of New York Press (10 titles); University of Minnesota and North Carolina Press (seven each); Indiana and McGill-Queen’s University Press (five each)–and, as ever, the range of subjects covered was eclectic. Whether your interests tend towards Maria Montessori’s pacifist philosophy, a study of regenerative farming, a musical history of the Cold War, or editorial techniques in the Hebrew Bible, the DDAs have you covered.

There are nearly 7,400 titles available to Cambridge readers across the two DDAs, and more ebooks are added every week. A selection of those which we now own outright 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).

• Buy Black : How Black Women Transformed US Pop Culture
• Crossing Borders : Sinology in Translation Studies
• Cyborgs, Sexuality, and the Undead : The Body in Mexican and Brazilian Speculative Fiction
• Decolonizing Data : Unsettling Conversations about Social Research Methods
• Divine Consumption : Sacrifice, Alliance Building, and Making Ancestors in West Africa
• Empire and Emancipation : Scottish and Irish Catholics at the Atlantic Fringe, 1780-1850
• Harry Potter and the Other : Race, Justice, and Difference in the Wizarding World
• Ideas in Unexpected Places : Reimagining Black Intellectual History
• The Infodemic : How Censorship and Lies Made the World Sicker and Less Free
• Joyce Writing Disability
• May We Be Spared to Meet on Earth : Letters of the Lost Franklin Arctic Expedition
• Nothing Gained Is Eternal: A Theology of Tradition
• Our Whole Gwich’in Way of Life Has Changed / Gwich’in K’yuu Gwiidandài’ Tthak Ejuk Gòonlih : Stories from the People of the Land
• Poetry, Politics, and the Law in Modern Ireland
• Psychic Investigators : Anthropology, Modern Spiritualism, and Credible Witnessing in the Late Victorian Age
• A Respectable Spell : Transformations of Samba in Rio de Janeiro
• Readings in Syrian Prison Literature : The Poetics of Human Rights
• Revolution in the City of Heroes : A Memoir of the Battle that Sparked Indonesia’s National Revolution
• Seeing with Free Eyes : The Poetic Justice of Euripides
• Southern Beauty : Race, Ritual, and Memory in the Modern South

Duke University Press 2023 collection

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).

• Consuelo Jimenez Underwood: Art, Weaving, Visio
• Health in Ruins: The Capitalist Destruction of Medical Care
• Nomenclature: New and Collected Poems
• On the Inconvenience of Other People
• Trading Futures: A Theological Critique of Financialized Capitalism
• Turning Archival: The Life of the Historical in Queer Studies
• Vanishing Sands: Losing Beaches to Mining
• Wake Up, This Is Joburg

University Library DDAs: September update

September 2022 saw another 79 titles purchased thanks to user activity on the UL’s two ebook DDA schemes (Ebook Central and JSTOR). As usual, the subjects of these works ranged widely: Mexico’s “Little Ice Age”, the music of James Tenney and class in Australia were amongst the topics covered. The most popular publishers were Catholic University of America Press (6 titles purchased), Indiana University Press (5), and SBL Press, State University of New York Press, and University of Minnesota Press (4 titles apiece).

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

• Being is Better Than Not Being : The Metaphysics of Goodness and Beauty in Aristotle
• A Dam for Africa : Akosombo Stories from Ghana
• Deep Mapping the Literary Lake District : A Geographical Text Analysis
• Fugitive Movements : Commemorating the Denmark Vesey Affair and Black Radical Antislavery in the Atlantic World
• Gender, Sex, and Tech! : An Intersectional Feminist Guide
• Just Care : Messy Entanglements of Disability, Dependency, and Desire
• More Than Shelter from the Storm : Hunter-Gatherer Houses and the Built Environment
• Movement of the People : Hungarian Folk Dance, Populism, and Citizenship
• Neo-Authoritarian Masculinity in Brazilian Crime Film
• Queering Chinese Kinship: Queer Public Culture in Globalizing China
• The Sound of Architecture : Acoustic Atmospheres in Place
• What Is a Gospel?

University Library DDAs: August 2022 update

August is normally one of the quietest months of the year in terms of activity on our two Demand-Driven Acquisition (DDA) schemes, but August 2022 was busier than usual: 83 titles were triggered for purchase, up from 58 in the same month last year. What had not changed was the breadth of material covered: everything from South Sudanese museum collections to 21st-century Indian literature to the American opioid crisis. The most popular publisher across the two schemes was Peeters (6 titles triggered), followed by University of Minnesota Press (5); McGill-Queen’s University Press, State University of New York Press and University of Virginia Press saw four titles purchased each. (It was not only North American publishers that saw activity: titles were purchased from presses based in Australia, Cameroon, Germany, the Netherlands, Singapore, and Zimbabwe.)

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

• Architecture and Objects
• Becoming Clara Schumann : Performance Strategies and Aesthetics in the Culture of the Musical Canon
• The Black Populations of France : Histories From Metropole to Colony
• Digital Authoritarianism in the Middle East : Deception, Disinformation and Social Media
• A Fan Studies Primer : Method, Research, Ethics
• Fracture Feminism : The Politics of Impossible Time in British Romanticism
• Haitian Revolutionary Fictions : An Anthology
• Health and Efficiency : Fatigue, the Science of Work, and the Making of the Working-Class Body
• Jerusalem Icons in the European Space
• Navigating CHamoru Poetry : Indigeneity, Aesthetics, and Decolonization
• Race in Young Adult Speculative Fiction
• Resist, Organize, Build : Feminist and Queer Activism in Britain and the United States During the Long 1980s
• Selling Britishness : Commodity Culture, the Dominions, and Empire
• Three Centuries of Travel Writing by Muslim Women
• The Urbanization of Forced Displacement : UNHCR, Urban Refugees, and the Dynamics of Policy Change
• When Does History Begin? : Religion, Narrative, and Identity in the Sikh Tradition

Ebook Central and JSTOR DDAs: July update

July saw 96 titles triggered for purchase across the UL’s two ebook DDA (demand-driven acquisition) schemes. In total, 1190 ebooks were acquired this way in the 2021-22 university financial year (slightly up from 1161 in 2020-21): the busiest month was February, when 130 titles were purchased by Cambridge readers. The most popular publishers across the twelve month period, in terms of numbers of titles triggered, were all US university presses:

• State University of New York Press: 92
• Stanford University Press: 88 (all pre-2022 titles, as we have purchased Stanford’s 2022 frontlist via De Gruyter)
• University of Minnesota Press: 76
• University of North Carolina Press: 65
• Indiana University Press: 64

The titles which we own outright as a result of activity in July are as varied as ever: a study of trauma in Portuguese comics; a history of jazz in China; an examination of the experience of African American soldiers during the Civil War. A selection can be seen below (click here to skip to a list of links). As ever, please do get in touch with the English Collections team (engcc@lib.cam.ac.uk) if you have any questions.

• Allotment Stories : Indigenous Land Relations under Settler Siege
• The Anonymity of a Commentator : Zakariyyā Al-Anṣārī and the Rhetoric of Muslim Commentaries
• Bones and Bodies : How South African Scientists Studied Race
• Common Phantoms : An American History of Psychic Science
• Eating While Black : Food Shaming and Race in America
• A Factotum in the Book Trade : A Memoir
• Graphic Migrations : Precarity and Gender in India and the Diaspora
• A Greek Thomist : Providence in Gennadios Scholarios
• High Courts in Global Perspective : Evidence, Methodologies, and Findings
• Multispecies Modernity : Disorderly Life in Postcolonial Literature
• Music and Mystique in Muscle Shoals
• Nation Without Narration : History, Memory and Identity in Postcolonial Cameroon
• Our Blessed Rebel Queen : Essays on Carrie Fisher and Princess Leia
• Pink Revolutions : Globalization, Hindutva, and Queer Triangles in Contemporary India
• Queer Country
• Rameses III, King of Egypt : His Life and Afterlife
• Satan and the Problem of Evil : From the Bible to the Early Church Fathers
• Underwriters of the United States : How Insurance Shaped the American Founding
• University Women : A History of Women and Higher Education in Canada
• Victorian Science & Imagery : Representation and Knowledge in Nineteenth Century Visual Culture
• Viral Cultures : Activist Archiving in the Age of AIDS