News and tips by and for staff providing reference services at the Newman Library, Baruch College (New York, NY).
ProQuest recently shut down the MyiLibrary ebook platform. All of the ebooks we had there are now found in Ebook Central.
If you have any featured book boxes in your LibGuides that have URLs going straight into the MyiLibrary platform, you will want to update them. The new link can either go to a permalink for the book record in OneSearch or to a permalink to the book in Ebook Central.
If you are off campus and try to use OneSearch to get to an ebook from MyiLibrary, you will run into a problem. Instead of getting our EZproxy login page (as you would for all off-campus access to e-resources) you get a MyiLibrary login page, which is of course impassable.
This problem only occurs if you are using OneSearch from off campus. You won’t see this problem if you:
Here’s a video I made to document this problem as part of the support ticket I just sent to the CUNY OLS Help Desk.
I’ll post an update here when the problem is resolved. In the meanwhile, if anyone needs to get to a specific title in MyiLibrary, they should use the Books search on the home page or launch MyiLibrary from the A-Z list of databases.
The Newman Library has started a patron-driven acquisition experiment with about 2,700 books from Coutts’ MyILibrary. The records for these books were carefully selected according to subject matter, publishers, years of publication, price and other variables to give us a current list of titles we do not own but that might be of interest to our users. A purchase is triggered the second time someone looks at the e-book.
How does this work? A user finds an e-book they are interested in in the catalog. They’ll click on the link which will take them to MyILibrary where they will see a Summary page with title and citation information, a brief summary, and a table of contents. This is free viewing. If they go on and take a look inside the book, this will count as a view, whether they look at it for 10 seconds or read the entire e-book. After a second view, the e-book is automatically purchased, and we will own it.
Every month new titles will be added and older ones removed. I will have access to the usage statistics.
The records for these titles have been added to the catalog but they look exactly like any other e-book record, and for obvious reasons, I cannot give an example to look at.
This is just one small part of our total monographic acquisition. It is not intended to replace our regular ordering procedures, but to supplement it.
It is hoped that this will alert us to gaps we might have in our collection, give users the ability to access immediately material of interest to them that we do not already own, and guarantee that there is already a verifiable interest in the e-books we purchase.
We have purchased last semester about about 30 e-books from myILibrary that we have access to via the catalog. This is Coutt’s e-book platform. I have not added MyILibrary to the list of our databases because of the small number of items available at this time, and my sense (and readings) that users don’t necessarily search a book database in the same way that one might search a journal database.
What do you think?