eBook User Guide: Accessing eBooks

This part of the guide goes over the basics of using the library's website, searching for ebooks, and browsing the ebook databases. Most of the time, you will access our ebooks either by searching in our catalog or by using our Article Databases Page. Each process is outlined below. Keep in mind that if you are accessing our website from off-campus, you may be asked to authenticate with the proxy by logging in with your uNID and password when you try to access ebooks. If you are unsure about how to properly authenticate with the proxy server, please see the Troubleshooting section of this guide for more details.

Seen below is the main page of the library's website. From here you can search for ebooks in the catalog, or access the ebook databases directly by selecting the Article Databases tab (next to the Catalog tab, which is the one selected below).

Method One: Searching the Library Catalog

If you want to access a specific ebook in our collection, you can do so by using the catalog search. You can access the catalog search from the library homepage (seen above), or by clicking here. If you want to search for an ebook, enter the title or other important information in the search box and hit enter. The following page will appear. By default, the catalog will search for all types of material that the library owns. To refine your search to only include ebooks, click the facets at the left to narrow your results. The choices you need to select to only get ebooks are highlighted in the screenshot below.

Once you've narrowed your results using the facets, you will be presented with a list that is entirely composed of ebooks, as seen below. Notice that all of the items in this list now say Online Access - this means that the item in question is a digital resource and not a physical book.

Following the steps above should get you to any specific ebook you want that we have access to. You can also click on the Advanced Search button at the top of the page to search the collection more precisely, filtering results by subject, year, title, author, and many other parameters. Please speak with a librarian if you have any questions about using the advanced search.

If it looks like we don't have a book you want, please click here to request that we purchase it. 

Method Two: Browsing the eBook Databases

If you aren't looking for any particular ebook, you can also browse our collections on the library's Article Databases Page. You can navigate to the article databases directly from the library homepage (under the Article Databases tab as shown earlier), or by clicking here. This page is used for ALL of the research databases at the U, so if you are trying to access ebooks do not click on one of the letters yet. To access only the ebook databases, select Electronic Books under the Select Databases By Type drop-down menu as shown below:

You should now see the following page on your screen. This is the list of all our ebook databases, and you can select whichever one you need. You can view a variety of information about each database below its title, including the years covered by the database and the number of users that can access the database simultaneously.

Most of the ebooks you can find in our catalog come from these databases and can be reached without using the catalog, but the catalog allows you to search most of our databases simultaneously. In general, if you are looking for a specific ebook, or a group of ebooks that share a common theme, you should search the catalog. If you are interested in browsing by subject or are looking for an ebook from a specific database, browsing via the Article Databases Page is a more effective choice.