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How to Access E-Resources

All you need to know to get the most out of the e-resources that Hampshire and the Five Colleges have to offer!

What types of ebooks will you find in the library & how can you use them?

ProQuest Ebook Central is where the vast majority of our ebooks come from, so if you click on a link to an ebook in our system, there's a very good chance that this is the interface you can expect to see! These ebooks are common across the Five Colleges, and are easy to jump in and start using. Here are some key features to be aware of:

  1. These are different ways for you to access the content of the book. Read Online is almost always the easiest and most convenient. Download PDF Chapter is also useful, though be mindful of the limits they set for the number of pages that can be downloaded this way. Download Book requires extra steps and setup, and isn't recommended unless you need access to the whole book offline.
  2. This section gives you information about the book, which can be useful for citation or notetaking. 
  3. The Table of Contents will generally allow you to jump around in the book or easily select a chapter to download.

You may be more familiar with JSTOR as a source for journal articles, but they also offer a sizeable collection of easy-to-use ebooks. JSTOR ebooks are generally especially notable for their generous download options, making them a good option if you're the type of person who likes to print things out so you can read a paper version. Here are some things that will help you get started using JSTOR ebooks:

  1. These are both useful! "Cite this Item" gives you APA, MLA, and Chicago works cited entries you can paste into a paper, and "Book Info" brings up a useful description of the resource to help you decide if it's what you're looking for.
  2. This is a stable URL for the book, which you can use to bookmark the title in the event that you want to get back to it. 
  3. The "Table of Contents" section is your primary means of accessing the book's content. Click on section/chapter titles (or "Read Online") to read the content online or choose "Download PDF" to save a copy of the chapter to your device.

Hampshire's ebooks from Oxford are a little different from most other ebooks we provide, in that there aren't a whole lot of them. That said, those titles we do have are excellent and useful, and you can access them by searching for them or by looking on the library's A-Z list of databases under O for Oxford. Subjects covered include various topics related to the arts and humanities, including the venerable Oxford English Dictionary. Here's a bit more information about using these resources:

  1. This and other information in this area gives you some useful details about the book, which can be helpful if you need to cite it.
  2. Most of our Oxford ebooks are encyclopedias or other reference texts with many individual entries in place of larger chapters or sections. This tool will help you navigate them, allowing you to look at more results per page and search for specific letters or words that appear at the start of an entry.
  3. Click on the title of an entry to be taken to the full text, which you can copy and paste or print out as needed.

We do have other types of ebooks that may show up among our resources from time to time - in particular, we have access to quite a few open access titles - but they're pretty uncommon. Getting to know the options that appear most frequently should do a good job preparing you for the variations you'll run into elsewhere, but just in case, if you ever feel you aren't sure how best to make use of an ebook (or any library resource!), please reach out to us at library@hampshire.edu and we'd be happy to help you figure it out.