Thursday, October 20, 2011

100,000 E-books From Open Library's "In Library" Lending Program



The Blume Library's membership in Open Library's new e-book lending program brings instant access to over 100,000 online titles to the St. Mary's community. Participating libraries in the "In Library" lending program pledge to make a part of their collection available in e-book format and, in return, their users are eligible to borrow e-books made available by over 1,000 other member libraries.

To borrow an e-book, you must be either connected to the campus network or authenticated through our proxy server as a member of the University community, in exactly the same way as other library databases work.

Once authenticated, you create your own account at Open Library using the "Sign Up" link at the upper right corner of the "Borrow eBooks" page. Search or browse for an e-book and begin reading!

E-books may also be downloaded and read offline using Adobe Digital Editions and can be transferred to portable reading devices compatible with that software.

Open Library is a project of the Internet Archive, and in addition to the lending library of current titles, it makes freely available nearly 1,000,000 other e-books in all languages, though the vast majority are older, out of copyright, works.

If you want to read more about the "In Library" lending program, it has been publicized in the Wall Street Journal, Publisher's Weekly magazine, and its own "Borrow eBooks" webpage.