New Product Announcement--->Academic Complete, Byron Hoyt, SME

A new collection of Ebooks and Musical Scores but we are keeping low key for now. Shhh.

All three products are from ebrary, and are a great resource for demonstrating the potential of e-books and full text for undergraduate education. However, ebrary requires a plug-in that is not yet loaded in the Information Commons. This will probably happen over the summer and until then we aren't providing much technical support. So, a full scale launch is NOT appropriate at this time.

Still, distance education students, music folks, and the rest of us, will want access asap so we can start exploring these tools and learning how they will integrate with instruction. Paul Pival has agreed to look the product over and provide some introduction for staff later in the term.

For now, if you want to explore, go to the site and download the client following the instructions--remember to use Internet Explorer. If the phrase "download a client" gives you the shivers, then give this one a miss for now.

Here are the three portions of ebrary we now subscribe to.

Academic Complete

With more than 20,300 titles, Academic complete includes all aggregated, academic Ebrary fixed collections in the areas of Business and economics; career and general education; computers, engineering and applied sciences; humanities; science, medicine and applied health; social and behavioral sciences. Also includes thousands of premier titles not available in any other Ebrary collection.

It isn't just the 20,000 titles, its the incredibly sophisticated and useful searching. you can go directly to the text where your term occurs, you can highlight text and right click to go to definitions, biographies, and britannica, you can highlight new text and run a search directly from the viewing page. Printing is easy and generous. This product truly opens up the potential of ebooks for research. Far superior to netLibrary in my opinion.

Byron Hoyt

Includes more than 8,300 sheet music titles for bands, orchestras, instrumentalists, and vocalists of all levels. Features classical titles from composers including Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, Chopin, Haydn, Mozart, Scarlatti, Schubert, and Tchaikovsky as well as a rich collection of early American sheet music titles published between 1850 and 1920.

Music scores are the bugbear of a music library. All those students, all that multiple copying and hand ons use in performance. The e-version of scores seems an ideal solution.

SME Source (Society of Manufacturing Engineers)

Features 3,800 books, journals, and technical papers in manufacturing engineering. Why you ask, because literature in this area is notoriously hard to find, and because this collection will be of broad use in any area of applied manufacturing from medicine to electrical engineering.