This is part of a regular series of articles exploring some of the terms used in e-learning (view other articles in the series). We’ll do our best to break down the jargon and explain what things are from a basic perspective.
Books that are available in an electronic format are known as e-books. e-books have gained in popularity recently. Many of you will have heard about, and maybe even used, e-book readers such as the Kindle and iPad. These lightweight, handheld devices enable you to store and access libraries full of books. They often have useful features such as the ability to annotate the books and bookmark pages easily.
At Sheffield Hallam University, we have purchased the rights to many e-books in addition to traditional paper books. Because of the way that academic publishers sell and manage the rights of e-books for large institutions, it is not always possible to download or transfer the learning centre e-books to e-book readers (unless they are pdf files). However, our e-books can all be downloaded for several days at a time to laptops.
Catalogue view of e-books
If your key reading is available as an e-book then this will benefit your students. Our e-books are listed in the Library Catalogue just like other learning centre resources. Students can access them directly from the catalogue without having to visit a learning centre.
In the National Student Survey students told us how important access to recommended texts was to them. Those last minute essay writers who find that all the time management experts have bagged the 15 available copies of a text can still get access to it if it is provided as an e-book. Students who live far from campus also benefit tremendously from the instant access that an online e-book provides.
When making choices about what books to buy Faculty Information Advisers will always try and buy an electronic version of a recommended or popular book if one is available from the four e-book collections we have access to.
Daswonera e-book search screen
If you are interested in finding out more about available e-books in your subject, we recommend having a conversation with your Faculty Information Adviser or reading the e-books page in the Library Gateway. There is also a recent library blog post which describes how to find e-books and a new trial where you can directly request new e-books using the Dawsonera search tool. For any technical questions or problems using e-books please email the learning centre.
