E-Books from Gale - Free Trial to June 6th

Gale is providing more and more titles in an e-book format. Here are 3 they are allowing people to use free until June 6th, to trial how it works. Access them through the Resource Shelf site.


Did you know we already have 3 such e-titles Biology, Animal Sciences and Encyclopedia of Food & Culture? Has any of you ever used them. I have from home for a 'last minute' assigment or two. Though I do find it hard to remember they are there and it would be almost impossible to stumble over them on the webpage and someone using iPac still has to know what to do once they are taken to the Journal Search page, after clicking on the link provided in the record.
Using electronic versions is away that we could extend our reference collections into homes and make the more specialist encyclopedias etc. available for customers at branches. Do you find that people are using our reference print collections less and less? If so this may be a way of providing quality information in a form customers are willing to use.
The problem is making them easily accessible. The hope is that the new Library Management System will have a federated search cabability and so will provide a one stop search to locate catalogue items, journal articles, chapters from e-books, photos and anything else we have loaded to the system which is relevant to their query.
A trial of the Gale version of this software is soon coming our way so we can see in practice, how it would work for us. But in the meantime try Trove it is an indication of what is possible.