National eBooks Project

We’re taking part in a national project looking at the impact of eBooks on students’ learning. It’s called the JISC national e-books observatory project and runs until the end of 2008. The project gives us free access to 36 titles, selected to support students in business and management studies, engineering, media studies and medicine. See the titles here. They are core and recommended reading texts. The medical eBooks are available on the Books@Ovid platform and the rest are on the MyiLibrary platform. There will be OPAC records for the titles soon. 

The UK Statute Law Database

The UK Statute Law Database is the official revised version of the statute book for the UK in electronic form. ‘The statute book’ is a term we use to mean all the primary legislation of a public general nature in force at any particular time. SLD is published ‘by Authority’, which means that it is published with the authority of the Crown. Previously accessible only to a limited number of users in government, SLD was made publicly available online, free of charge, on 20 December 2006. 

Ebrary eBooks

We have a gigantic new collection of eBooks from Ebrary – 35,000 titles covering subjects from architecture to zoology. We’ve signed up to a two-year subscription to the top of the range Academic Complete collection. It includes a stream of new additions, unlimited multi-user access and the option of creating your own personal bookshelf. The books are organised into subject collections, which you could link to from your subject pages. The Ebrary Reader software, which is needed to view the books, has been installed on all the student PCs and most staff PCs. The collection can now be accessed through OPAC, found by adding ‘electronic books’ to your keyword search terms.