Ebook Central and JSTOR DDAs: June update

After the flurry of activity in May, June was a much quieter month across the UL’s two DDA (demand-driven acquisition) ebook schemes, with a relatively modest 86 titles triggered for purchase altogether. As usual, though, the subject matter of the ebooks which piqued the interest of readers ranged widely, covering everything from gender in country music to film adaptations of children’s books to a biography of an Indian ambassador to Egypt. The most popular publishers were all North American: McGill-Queen’s University Press, University of Notre Dame Press and University Press of Mississippi all saw five of their titles purchased. However, there were also works released by publishers in Australia, Belgium, Germany, Hong Kong, India, and South Africa.

There are now around 6750 unpurchased ebooks available via the two DDA schemes. A sample of titles which we now own outright can be seen below (click here to skip to the iDiscover links). If you have any questions, please do get in touch with the English Collections team (engcc@lib.cam.ac.uk).

• The Art of Being Dangerous : Exploring Women and Danger Through Creative Expression
• Colonial Kinship : Guaraní, Spaniards, and Africans in Paraguay
• The Convict Valley : The Bloody Struggle on Australia’s Early Frontier
• Dante’s “Other” Works : Assessments and Interpretations
• Drug Cartels Do Not Exist : Narcotrafficking in U.S. and Mexican Culture
• Empire News : The Anglo-Indian Press Writes India
• Equipping Space Cadets : Primary Science Fiction for Young Children
• Feminist Formalism and Early Modern Women’s Writing : Readings, Conversations, Pedagogies
• Jewish Literary Eros : Between Poetry and Prose in the Medieval Mediterranean
• The Limits of Common Humanity : Motivating the Responsibility to Protect in a Changing Global Order
• Mongolian Sound Worlds
• The Morphology of Urban Landscapes : History, Analysis, Design
• Pandemic Societies
• Poisoned Eden : Cholera Epidemics, State-Building, and the Problem of Public Health in Tucumán, Argentina, 1865-1908
• Turntables and Tropes : A Rhetoric of Remix

Oxford Scholarship Online and Oxford Handbooks Online: renewed for 2022-23

I’m pleased to be able to say that the UL has renewed its evidence-based acquisition scheme (EBA) with Oxford Scholarship Online for another year, until June 2023. Via the EBA, thousands of Oxford University Press ebooks are made available (unlimited and DRM-free) to our readers, with new titles added every month; at the end of the twelve-month period of the agreement, we select titles for perpetual access (selections are usually based on a combination of usage statistics and recommendations from subject librarians). The EBA is funded by the UL’s Collections and Academic Liaison, with some funding from the Squire Law Library and STEMM libraries for modules in their subject areas. This year, we will for the first time have access to all subjects across OSO, including some which we have never taken before: these include Earth Sciences and Geography, Public Health and Epidemiology, and Social Work.

We have also purchased the 2022 updates for all of the Oxford Handbooks Online. Like OSO, the OHO platform is updated monthly, with new chapters being added; the print edition of each handbook is only issued once it is complete, so our access to OHO means that we have the most up-to-date access to the content.

A selection of some recent additions to the Oxford Scholarship Online platform can be seen below (click here to skip to the list of iDiscover links). If you have any questions about either resource, please do get in touch with the English Collections team (engcc@lib.cam.ac.uk).

• From Servant to Savant : Musical Privilege, Property, and the French Revolution
• Intimate Empire : The Mansurov Family in Russia and the Orthodox East, 1855-1936
• Live Artefacts : Literature in a Cognitive Environment
• The Making of Meaning : From the Individual to Social Order
• The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order : America and the World in the Free Market Era
• Stripping the Veil : Convent Reform, Protestant Nuns, and Female Devotional Life in Sixteenth Century Germany
• This is the BBC : Entertaining the Nation, Speaking for Britain, 1922-2022
• An Uneasy Guest in the Schoolhouse : Art Education from the Colonial Times to a Promising Future
• Untapped Power : Leveraging diversity and Inclusion for Conflict and Development

Ebook Central and JSTOR DDAs: May update

May was the busiest month of this academic year on the UL’s two DDAs (Ebook Central and JSTOR), with 132 titles triggered for purchase by users, bringing the overall total for the year to 1008. State University Press of New York was, once again, the most popular publisher, accounting for 12 titles (altogether, Cambridge users have purchased 87 SUNY ebooks via the DDA since the start of August), followed by University of North Carolina Press (10 ebooks) and University of Nebraska Press (6). As usual, the variety of topics covered was extremely broad: amongst those 132 ebooks was a history of food habits in the Ottoman Empire, a biography of William Faulkner, and a study of how prehistoric communities provided healthcare.

There are over 6500 unpurchased ebooks available via the two DDA schemes, with more added weekly. A sample of titles which we now own outright can be seen below (click here to skip to the iDiscover links). If you have any questions, please do get in touch with the English Collections team (engcc@lib.cam.ac.uk).

• Against Racism : Organizing for Social Change in Latin America
• Arise, Africa! Roar, China! : Black and Chinese Citizens of the World in the Twentieth Century
• Black Earth, White Bread : A Technopolitical History of Russian Agriculture and Food
• Cacaphonies : The Excremental Canon of French Literature
• Commodity Politics : Contesting Responsibility in Cameroon
• Feeding Fascism : The Politics of Women’s Food Work
• Gangs on Trial : Challenging Stereotypes and Demonization in the Courts
• Husserl and the Idea of Europe 
• Iran and its Histories : From the Beginnings Through the Achaemenid Empire
• Racial Erotics : Gay Men of Color, Sexual Racism, and the Politics of Desire
• Scripts of Blackness : Early Modern Performance Culture and the Making of Race
• Sick and Tired : An Intimate History of Fatigue
• South Asian Filmscapes : Transregional Encounters
• Technologies of Human Rights Representation
• Transforming Medical Education : Historical Case Studies of Teaching, Learning, and Belonging in Medicine

Ebook Central and JSTOR DDAs: April update

Another 113 titles were triggered for purchase by Cambridge users across our two DDAs in April, taking the total for this academic year (starting in August) to 876. Almost half of the 113 were books published in 2021 or 2022, and while the most popular publishers were North American ones (University of Minnesota Press took the lead with eleven titles purchased, followed by Indiana University Press and State University of New York Press, with five apiece), there were also books published in Australia, Cameroon, Egypt, the Netherlands, and Singapore. The subject matter covered was, as ever, very wide-ranging: everything from toxic masculinity in superhero films to a rap music in Los Angeles to urbanization in rural China.

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

• Arc of the Journeyman : Afghan Migrants in England
• Batman Saves the Congo : How Celebrities Disrupt the Politics of Development
• Buenos Aires Across the Arts : Five and One Theses on Modernity, 1921-1939
• Contemporary Korean Shamanism : From Ritual to Digital
• Educating Egypt : Civic Values and Ideological Struggles
• Finding Order in Diversity : Religious Toleration in the Habsburg Empire, 1792-1848
• Performing Environmentalisms : Expressive Culture and Ecological Change
• Politics and the British Novel in The 1970s
• Return to the Interactive Past : The Interplay of Video Games and Histories
• Sea Nomads of Southeast Asia : From the Past to the Present
• Seasonal Settlement in the Medieval and Early Modern Countryside
• Ukraine in History and Stories : Essays by Ukrainian Intellectuals

Ebook Central and JSTOR DDAs: March update

An examination of Turkish foreign policy; a look at the possible future of work; a study of fan fiction and the BBC’s Sherlock. These are just three of the 111 titles triggered for purchase by users across the UL’s two DDA schemes (Ebook Central and JSTOR) in March, and demonstrate that the subjects which Cambridge users are interested in are as varied as ever. As usual, State University of New York Press was the most popular publisher (ten titles purchased), followed by McGill-Queen’s University Press (seven titles); ebooks were also triggered from publishers based in Australia, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Nigeria, the Philippines, and Zimbabwe.

In total, 763 ebooks have been purchased via the two DDAs since the beginning of August; there are nearly 6,200 titles available, with more being added all the time. A selection of ebooks which we own outright as a result of the activity in March can be seen below. As ever, if you have any questions, please do get in touch with the English Collections team (engcc@lib.cam.ac.uk).

• Amnesia : A History of Democratic Idealism in Modern Thailand
• The Borders of AIDS : Race, Quarantine, and Resistance
• Emirs in London : Subaltern Travel and Nigeria’s Modernity
• Global 1968 : Cultural Revolutions in Europe and Latin America
• I the People : The Rhetoric of Conservative Populism in the United States
• L. M. Montgomery and Gender
• The Making of the Bible : From the First Fragments to Sacred Scripture
• The Male Chauvinist Pig : A History
• Museum, Magic, Memory : Curating Paul Denys Montague
• An OutKast Reader : Essays on Race, Gender, and the Postmodern South
• The Platform Economy and the Smart City : Technology and the Transformation of Urban Policy
• The Poetics of Cruising : Queer Visual Culture from Whitman to Grindr
• The Politics of Black Joy : Zora Neale Hurston and Neo-Abolitionism
• Positioning Pooh : Edward Bear After One Hundred Years
• Queercore : How to Punk a Revolution: An Oral History
• Rite, Flesh, and Stone : the Matter of Death in Contemporary Spanish Culture
• South-South Solidarity and the Latin American Left
• This Bridge Called My Back : Writings by Radical Women of Color (Fortieth Anniversary Edition)

New ebook collection: Stanford University Press 2022 (plus backlist titles!)

We’re very pleased to announce that the UL’s Collections and Academic Liaison has purchased a new ebook collection: Stanford University Press’s 2022 collection, hosted on the De Gruyter platform. Stanford has been one of the most popular publishers included in the UL’s long-running Ebook Central DDA, and this new collection will mean that Cambridge users have DRM-free (i.e. unlimited) access to approximately 110 titles due to be published in the course of 2022. In addition, we will have access for the year to nearly 1500 older Stanford titles, published between 2000 and 2013.

The first batch of 2022 titles (all attached to the Stanford University Press 2022 collection) have been added to iDiscover, and more will be added as they are released. A selection of the titles which are now available can be seen below.

• Acts of Growth : Development and the Politics of Abundance in Peru
• The Bleeding Wound : The Soviet War in Afghanistan and the Collapse of the Soviet System
• Counterrevolution : The Crusade to Roll Back the Gains of the Civil Rights Movement
• Figures of Possibility : Aesthetic Experience, Mysticism, and the Play of the Senses
• Reinventing Human Rights
• Strike Patterns : Notes from Postwar Laos

If you have any questions about this collection, please do get in touch with the English Collections team (engcc@lib.cam.ac.uk).

Ebook Central and JSTOR DDAs: February update

130 ebooks were triggered for purchase and are now owned in perpetuity in February. The busiest day was 24th, when eleven books were triggered in a single day! As well as the ever-popular North American university presses (top, once again, was State University of New York Press, with 12 titles purchased during the month, followed by Indiana University Press, with 8), titles were triggered from publishers in Australia, Germany, India, the Netherlands, the Philippines, the West Indies, and Zimbabwe. Subjects covered ranged from a study of Neil Gaiman’s work to a history of the Federal Reserve to an account of the church struggle against apartheid in South Africa.

There are currently over 6,000 titles available to Cambridge readers across the two DDA schemes. A selection of February’s purchases can be seen below. As ever, if you have any questions, please do get in touch with the English Collections team (engcc@lib.cam.ac.uk).

• An Afro-Indigenous History of the United States
• Arab Masculinities : Anthropological Reconceptions in Precarious Times
• Arranged Companions : Marriage and Intimacy in Qing China
• Bodies Built for Game : The Prairie Schooner Anthology of Contemporary Sports Writing
• Colonial Legacies : Contemporary Lens-Based Art and the Democratic Republic of Congo
• Fashioning Postfeminism : Spectacular Femininity and Transnational Culture
• Garbage in Popular Culture : Consumption and the Aesthetics of Waste
• Imagined Geographies : the Maritime Silk Roads in World History, 100-1800
• Ireland and America : Empire, Revolution, and Sovereignty
• Lives Beyond Borders : US Immigrant Women’s Life Writing, Nationality, and Social Justice
• The Moral Economy of Welfare and Migration : Reconfiguring Rights in Austerity Britain
• The Muslim Brothers in Society : Everyday Politics, Social Action, and Islamism in Mubarak’s Egypt
• Negative Geographies : Exploring the Politics of Limits
• Planetary Specters : Race, Migration, and Climate Change in the Twenty-First Century
• Religion and Empire in Portuguese India : Conversion, Resistance, and the Making of Goa
• Revolutionary Routines : The Habits of Social Transformation
• Sacred As Secular : Secularization under Theocracy in Iran
• Salvation Through Temptation : Maximus the Confessor and Thomas Aquinas on Christ’s Victory over the Devil
• Transmovimientos : Latinx Queer Migrations, Bodies, and Spaces
• Village Work : Development and Rural Statecraft in Twentieth-Century Ghana
• A Warning for Fair Women : Adultery and Murder in Shakespeare’s Theater

Ebook Central and JSTOR DDAs: January update

January saw 119 titles being triggered for permanent purchase across the UL’s two DDA (demand-driven acquisition) ebook schemes (Ebook Central and JSTOR). As usual, the subject matter of the ebooks acquired in perpetuity was very varied–everything from the uses of DNA ancestry testing to pluralism in Plato to supervillains–and much of it was hot off the press: 40 of those 119 titles were published within the past twelve months. The most popular publisher was State of University New York Press, with 13 titles purchased, followed by Indiana University Press (8 titles) and the university presses of Illinois and Minnesota (5 titles apiece).

A selection of titles which we now own outright can be seen below. If you have any questions, please do get in touch with the English Collections team (engcc@lib.cam.ac.uk).

• After the Corinthian Women Prophets : Reimagining Rhetoric and Power
• Amazonian Kichwa of the Curaray River : Kinship and History in the Western Amazon
• Difficult Choices : Taiwan’s Quest for Security and the Good Life
• From the Vilna Ghetto to Nuremberg : Memoir and Testimony
• Gendering Modern Jewish Thought
• Ingenuity in the Making : Matter and Technique in Early Modern Europe
• Making Levantine Cuisine : Modern Foodways of the Eastern Mediterranean
• The Poetics of Difference: Queer Feminist Forms in the African Diaspora
• The Record of Murders and Outrages : Racial Violence and the Fight over Truth at the Dawn of Reconstruction
• Remaking Home : Domestic Spaces in Argentine and Chilean Film, 2005-2015
• Trans Historical : Gender Plurality Before the Modern
• Zimbolicious Poetry Anthology : Volume 1

Ebook Central and JSTOR DDAs: December update

There are now nearly 5,750 ebooks available to readers via the UL’s two DDA schemes (Ebook Central and JSTOR), and in December, 84 titles were triggered for purchase (of which 40 were books published in 2021). The most popular publisher was Fortress Press, with six ebooks purchased, followed by the perenially popular State University of New York Press (five titles), and then the university presses of Stanford, Nebraska and Florida, with four apiece. As ever, the subject matter of the titles was very broad, ranging from the history of African American periodicals to the use of social media in China, as well as a guide to book proposals for scholarly authors.

A selection of titles which we now own outright and in perpetuity can be seen below. If you have any questions, please do get in touch with the English Collections team (engcc@lib.cam.ac.uk).

• Arab American Women : Representation and Refusal
• The Archaeology of New Netherland : a World Built on Trade
• Avant-Garde Nationalism at the Dublin Gate Theatre, 1928-1940
• Christianity and Politics in Tribal India : Baptist Missionaries and Naga Nationalism
• Desire After Dark : Contemporary Queer Cultures and Occultly Marvelous Media
• The Desire of Psychoanalysis : Exercises in Lacanian Thinking
• Global China : Assessing China’s Growing Role in the World
• Green Mass : The Ecological Theology of St. Hildegard of Bingen
• Imperial Bodies in London : Empire, Mobility, and the Making of British Medicine, 1880-1914
• In the Blood of Our Brothers : Abolitionism and the End of the Slave Trade in Spain’s Atlantic Empire, 1800-1870
• Listening to Bob Dylan
• Monsters and Monarchs : Serial Killers in Classical Myth and History
• Ordering the Myriad Things : From Traditional Knowledge to Scientific Botany in China
• The Phantom World of Digul : Policing As Politics in Colonial Indonesia, 1926-1941
• Prose of the World : Denis Diderot and the Periphery of Enlightenment
• A Spectrum of Unfreedom : Captives and Slaves in the Ottoman Empire
• Three Cities After Hitler : Redemptive Reconstruction Across Cold War Borders
• Toni Morrison’s Spiritual Vision : Faith, Folktales, and Feminism in Her Life and Literature

De Gruyter EBA: renewed for 2022

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 gives Cambridge readers access to approximately 92,000 titles. These are made up of the the outputs of the various De Gruyter imprints, as well as 23 (mainly US-based) partner presses who participate in the EBA, including Princeton, Columbia, Cornell, and Harvard University Press; Edinburgh University Press is one of the most recent additions to the partner press list, and their content should start to appear on the De Gruyter platform (and in iDiscover) in 2022.

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 generally purchase somewhere in the region of 750-800 titles, across a variety of subject areas.

We will soon be starting this selection process for the past calendar year. A handful of titles purchased based on 2020 usage can be seen below.

• Close-Ups and Long Shots in Modern Chinese Cinemas
• A Velvet Empire : French Informal Imperialism in the Nineteenth Century
• China und Asiens maritime Achse im Mittelalter : Konzepte, Wahrnehmungen, offene Fragen
• Composite Architecture : Building and Design with Carbon Fiber and FRPs
• Die Polis als Sieger : Kriegsdenkmäler im archaisch-klassischen Griechenland
• Geschichte und Dichtung : Die Ästhetisierung historischen Denkens von Winckelmann bis Fontane
• Greeks, Books and Libraries in Renaissance Venice
• Heavenly Fatherland : German Missionary Culture and Globalization in the Age of Empire
• Handbuch zur Geschichte Südosteuropas. 1, Handbuch zur Geschichte Südosteuropas ; Band 1: Herrschaft und Politik in Südosteuropa von der römischen Antike bis 1300
• Middle Assyrian Seal Motifs from Tell Fekheriye (Syria)
• Philosophy and Language in the Islamic World
• Stefan George – Ernst Morwitz : Briefwechsel (1905-1933)
• The Broadside Ballad in Early Modern England : Moving Media, Tactical Publics
• The Buddhist Self : On Tathāgatagarbha and Ātman
• Warten auf Godot? : Intellektuelle seit den 1960er Jahren

If you have any questions about the EBA, please do get in touch with the English Collections team (engcc@lib.cam.ac.uk).