To all of our amazing colleagues across academic and professional support departments, and our wonderful students, whether you’re playing football in the field outside the Bill Bryson Library, or at home caring for family and loved ones, our thoughts and best wishes are with you at a time which many of us are trying to struggle for normalcy as everything is changing rapidly around us.
University Library and Collections colleagues are working flat out (both on campus, and working from home – we’ll be sharing pictures and experiences in the near future!) to try to ensure that our existing collections are made as accessible as possible and we are providing support wherever we can, in challenging times (see our web pages for more details and updates including click & collect services, expanded virtual library help and live chat support).
But we are also working with publishers and library colleagues at other universities to ensure we can ease access online to resources wherever we can, for both students and staff. We have highlighted some of those new developments below:
As always, most of our ebooks can be found via Library Discover – go search!
For help with free tools to find open access journal articles and other resources, you can also read our #openaccessweek blog post here!
Cambridge University Press
All 700 textbooks published and currently available in HTML format on Cambridge Core are now available, even where we have not previously purchased a copy. Free access is available until the end of May 2020 – we love CUP!
A full list of HTML textbooks on Cambridge CORE can be found here.
JSTOR
JSTOR are working with publishers to make more than 20,000 books available at no charge for JSTOR Participating academic institutions.
You can access JSTOR directly here.
Project Muse
All books (we already have access to all of their journals) from selected publishers are now freely available, through to May or June 2020!
See here for a list of publishers.
You can access Project MUSE directly here
EBSCO ebooks
EBSCO have upgraded us to unlimited access for all ebooks we own from a wide range of publishers, until the end of June.
See here a list of participating publishers.
Durham Staff and Students can access EBSCO full ebooks collection directly here.
ProQuest ebooks
ProQuest have also upgraded us to unlimited access for all ebooks we own from a wide range of publishers, until mid-June.
See here for a full-list of participating publishers.
What does ‘unlimited access’ mean? Many e-books, whilst available online, offer a consecutive user limit – often meaning no more than 1, 3 or 5 users can be reading a single book at any one time (I mean, that is still better than 5 people trying to crowd round a single text-book on a desk, or trying to find space for 5 copies of every text book on our shelves, but it did sometimes mean you could be ‘turned-away’ from accessing a book because there were others accessing it at that moment.
Not any more! Unlimited access means that, where we are likely to see more people trying to access reading online at the same time, these small but immutable barriers are being temporarily removed. We hope this makes accessing reading online, wherever you are, that little bit easier!
With many thanks to the publishers and platform suppliers who we know are also working hard in a quickly changing environment.
RSS - Posts
Leave a Reply