Thing 21: E-Books

I decided to indulge a different interest of mine from Tolkien for this thing, and went to the Gutenberg site and searched on Russian Literature. Naturally, the holdings could not reflect the vast dimensions of this topic. However, I did find some things that really interested me. Here is a link to a book about Russian literature published in 1911. Dated, but not if you're interested in the 19th century.

I was able to search easily and quickly, and move about through the hyperlinked references. This is especially useful for the many author references. I can see that there is alot of content in there if I want to go after it.

The library where I work is already pretty oriented to online reading. We are less than a decade old, and have only about 12,000 print volumes. However, we have nearly 3 times that number from ebrary, netlibrary, and specialized to engineering providers such as Knovel.

The access statistics I'm tasked with gathering tend to show the our students make full use of these resources, and definately prefer online serial resources to print - in fact we have jettisoned print wherever we have electronic coverage that we know is stable. Online searching of content for journals is so useful, and specialized indexes such as Web of Science, which allows searchers to rank articles according to number of times cited, facilitate this trend.

In this respect, we are rapidly moving beyond the old model for research.