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Introducing Scholars Portal E-book Platform Have you had students trying to access the limited number of print books required for your courses? What about the time you wanted to read a chapter and the print book had been checked out? That is all set to change with the launch of the new Ontario Council of University Libraries (OCUL) E-Book platform, containing over 40,000 books from commercial publishers. It includes material from Springer, Oxford University Press, Cambridge University Press, Elsevier, Taylor & Francis, and many more! In addition, there are 200,000 books from the Internet Archives, which assembles material digitized by a number of schools as well as a collection of Ontario government documents identified by the Ontario Digitization Initiative. The new Scholars Portal (SP) E-Books search/browse interface provides:
 The E-Books platform also has a new web reader with the following functions:
Over the next couple of months, Scholars Portal will be continuing to add content and working on a French language interface, as well as conducting an accessibility review and running usability testing to enhance the interface/reader. Undergraduate and graduate students at York have commented on the clean interface, the ability to cite e-books using tools like RefWorks and/or Endnote as well as the ability to view these books on mobile devices. Some other features include a permanent link for every book so that the URL can be directly added to your course/Moodle page. This provides seamless access to the e-book after Passport York authentication. Other value-added features available from this platform can be viewed from this chart.
York University students and faculty have access to other academic e-books from content providers like
The complete list for the sciences can be viewed from this link. We also have many e-books for students pursuing degrees in Arts, Humanities & Social Sciences. Some of them include:
Other e-book packages are listed on this page. Most of the e-books can be found using the library catalogue; however, you may need to search specific e-book platforms for most recent additions. We would appreciate your feedback on the use of e-books in teaching and research. If you would like the Libraries to check the availability of specific e-books, please send an e-mail to Ilo Katryn-Maimets, Acting AUL (Collections) at ilo@yorku.ca. For any other comments about Scholars Portal E-books, please send an e-mail to ebooks@scholarsportal.info. — Rajiv Nariani, Science Librarian, Steacie Science and Engineering Library |
