Downloading ebrary eBooks To Your Device

Our ebrary database is our best general collection of ebooks that would be considered "monographs." That is, regular books with chapters rather than reference books with entries. (For reference books, GVRL and Sage eReference are two better choices.) Most of these books are part of a subscription database of over 30,000 volumes called ebrary Academic Complete. But many others we have either purchased for our own library collection, or have posted to ebrary from various vendors, NGOs, government agencies, or public domain free sources.

Ebrary has a nice readable interface, similar to a standard PDF. And it has plenty of tools (some of which require setting up an individual account) like doing word searches within the book, highlighting, saving materials to a personal bookshelf, and printing chapters (within certain limits). For more, generally, on how to fully utilize ebrary, see their Quick Start Guide.

But many people want to read ebooks on their tablet, ebook reader, or on their smartphone. They don't want to be tethered to a computer. Until recently, readers of ebrary ebooks had no options in this regard. Now you do. Ebrary has launched a download function, which they are continuing to refine.

The details of this are best detailed by Amy's detailed LibGuide on the subject, since how you do the downloads and whether you can download entire books or only chapter PDFs vary from device to device.

As illustrated on the top screenshot, you will now see a download icon above the contents of ebrary ebooks. You will need to set up an account to make full use of the download functionality. Once you do, you should be able to download chapter PDFs for all books. And for those books designated to accept multiple simultaneous users, you will even be able to download the entire ebook to your personal device. Options for download will look like this:


For those books that only permit a single viewer at a time to use them, you will not be able to do a full-book download. Instead, you will see this message:


Getting this set up for the first time on your device will likely take a little time and effort. And Kindle readers are especially problematic. But do look through the tabbed pages of our guide for much more on how to use this new functionality.

Fresh Technologies: Digital Microfilm

With the possible exception of the admirable Sonia of our Reference team, most people really hate dealing with microfilm. Being forced to schlep into the library, find a reel, spool it to the right spot, and then straining to read it or line up a proper copy image, is considered a major hassle. That's one of the reasons that Sawyer Library has--for many years--provided free microfilm copying. Your suffering does not include additional expense at this particular library when it comes to using microfilm or microfiche.

However, here is some good news: The major purveyor and producer of microfilm serials in this country, ProQuest (formerly UMI), has just released a new online means of providing digital images of newspapers and journals and they call it Digital Microfilm.

The major advantage to Digital Microfilm is that, like our other online resources, it is available to Suffolk users 24/7 from wherever you have an internet connection. We currently have three titles available on digital microfilm--Barron's, Wall Street Journal, and the Boston Globe. As you can tell from the OPAC pages that I've linked to, these are publications that we often have in a multiplicity of formats. But although the article content for, say, the Globe, might be available in databases like Massachusetts Newsstand, if you wanted to see advertising, illustrations and the like, you'd need an actual image and not just an html reproduction of the fulltext. This is the type of thing that our digital microfilm will be good at providing.

This cover-to-cover digital image becomes even more important for those who want to see, for example, the stock and other security pricing provided in tables of the Wall Street Journal, since the ProQuest current database for the WSJ doesn't include anything but article text, while the "Historical Newspapers" coverage only comes as far as 1992!

So, Digital Microfilm (which we have 2008 to date) will fill in some coverage gaps for those needing the actual image of the publication in question.

To use the digital microfilm, first click on the link from the online catalog entry for your publication. This will bring you to a plain page that relays you to our account (click the link if the connection is not automatically made).

The interface is still a bit clunky, so the next step is to click the blue word link to Select the publication you want. Another widow will open to the side with the three papers listed. Pick the one you are looking for. The publication name will move to the search form, then select the year, month and day.

As I've indicated, this interface is still a work in progress. I have found that as you step through the year/month/day process, you may get ahead of the product, so do this slowly. And the digital reader seems to disappear when you minimize the imaging tool to work in another window. Although printing is easy to do, since the original page is usually a large one, you may have to change the print specs or use a magnifier on the small page image when you print! Experiment with adjustable aspects like brightness, contrast, and magnification to get an image that works for you. Consult the help guide for more assistance.

Another shortfall of the product is that it is slow to be produced. People expect digital products to be instant gratification, but there is a two to five month delay in the date-load of these publications. And the biggest downside to digital microfilm is that it is really not a "database." There is no keyword or other search mechanism in the Reader. (The PDF form has a search box but it does not work, so do not think that a "No Matches" result means your word string isn't in the paper.) This really is like a (dumb) microfilm reader in cyberspace. So come to the microfilm with a citation, or be willing to scroll through the thumbnails and pages to get to what you want.

I don't want to "bad-mouth" this breakthrough too much. For most people it will be a tremendous improvement in convenience and ease of use over the traditional reel storage material. So take advantage of Digital Microfilm when the need arises.