New e-book Resource at CFL!

Because UND has access to many of their journal packges, you might have already heard about JSTOR, the service that began by digitizing scholarly journal backfiles, especially in arts, humanities, social sciences, and business. JSTOR was founded in 1995 by William Bowen, former President of Princeton University; the acronym is short for “Journal Storage.”

What you might not know is that JSTOR is in the e-book business as well and they’ve recently created a new model which greatly increases access to e-books from scholarly academic presses. It is called “Evidence Based Acquisition” (EBA). EBA offers access to over 25,000 high-quality backlist titles from 35 publishers for a set upfront fee, which currently provides us with unlimited access for multiple simultaneous users all year long. At the end of the first year, we can select titles for perpetual access, using usage data as a guide and deducting the price of the book from the total. This allows us to see exactly what our faculty, staff, and students need and are using, in advance, from a huge collection, and to combine usage data and librarian expertise to anticipate future needs. The collection includes titles from such publishers as Princeton University Press, Yale University Press, the Brookings Institution, and many more. This 25,000-title file greatly increases the e-books available for CFL patrons, and it also allows us to maximize access to resources, while selecting titles for perpetual access as users find them valuable.

We’ve also embedded a little “trick” that will help users search for the e-books from the library’s catalog. If you wish to search for all titles in this collection, use the search term “JSTOR EBA” in the library catalog search box. Individual titles from this collection will also come up in regular searches when they match your search terms.