Category Archives: ebooks

New Old Images of Middlebury

Recently, thanks to a tip from the friend of a friend we purchased some antique stereoscope views of Middlebury College and the Town of Middlebury in an online auction. (Shout out to the friend of Prof. Kevin Moss!)

Main Street Middlebury, looking northeast, before the great fire, circa 1880.
Notice the high meadows on Chipman Hill behind the church steeple.

Stereoscope cards hold two identical photographs, mounted side by side and slightly offset. When they’re viewed through a stereoscope viewer, a three dimensional image emerges.

A state of the art and thrilling parlor entertainment throughout the late nineteenth century, these rare images don’t need to be viewed in stereo to be appreciated online today.

*Main St. looking west over Otter Creek after a fire obliterated most of the buildings in the picture above.*

*Old Stone Row viewed from the top of Kitchel House, 1881*

*Old Stone Row taken in front of Starr Hall, circa 1880*

*We were initially thrown off by this house due to the view of Chipman Hill in the distance. A little sleuthing confirmed a 19th century snapshot of the Weybridge House*

*Weybridge House on the corner of College St. compared to today*

*The cards all appear to be from the studio of O. C. Barnes*

New e-book collections

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The Middlebury community now has unlimited access to several new collections of e-books:

Springer Nature – we have added e-books published in 2018 in the following collections of e-Books on the SpringerLink platform: Behavioral Science and Psychology; Biomedical and Life Sciences; Business and Management; Chemistry and Materials Science; Computer Science; Earth and Environmental Science; Economics and Finance; Education; Energy; Engineering; Mathematics and Statistics; Medicine; Physics and Astronomy; Professional and Applied Computing.

JSTOR – we now have access to e-books published between 2013 and 2017 in these collections: Archaeology; Business and Economics; Education; Film Studies; History; Language and Literature; Law; Music; Philosophy; Political Science; Religion; Science and Technology; Sociology.

All of these e-books (over 11,000 of them) can be found in Midcat or in a Summon search.

Cambridge Companions – new to the library

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The Middlebury libraries have acquired access to all 660 volumes of Cambridge Companions. Covering diverse topics – from Claude Levi-Strauss to American Islam, Tacitus to Modern Japanese Culture – the Cambridge Companions are a series of authoritative guides, written by leading experts, offering lively, accessible introductions to major writers, artists, philosophers, topics, and periods.

You can browse from the Cambridge Companions homepage, or find these by title or subject in Midcat or content in the Cambridge Companions will be found in a Summon search.

EBSCO e-books how-to: update

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For some time, we have had access to over 150,000 ebooks on the EBSCOhost platform. Some details about how to access these have changed recently, so here is an update to this earlier post.

The starting point remains the same: You can search for them here, or in the library catalog, or if you do a Summon search and one of these more than 157,000 books has content connected to your search term, Summon will lead you to the book.

To read the book online (in a browser session on the EBSCOhost platform), you still need to create an account as described in the earlier post.

If you know you will want to download the book, you will (in addition to a personal account) also need Adobe Digital Editions (ADE).

Once you’ve found the book you want to read, sign in to your personal EBSCOhost account via the button on the top menu (screenshot below). Once you have logged in to your account, click the Download button and it will ask you to confirm you want to “check the book out for seven days.” Click yes and the book will be downloaded in a format compatible with ADE. After each period of seven days you will be able to renew the book. If you do not renew, the e-book will disappear from your device(s).

If you encounter any problems with this or any online library resource, please contact eaccess-admin@middlebury.edu

EBSCO E-books – how-to

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A few months ago, the library subscribed to EBSCO e-books. You can search for them here, or in the library catalog, or if you do a Summon search and one of these more than 157,000 books has content connected to your search term, Summon will lead you to the book.

Then what?

Below is a screenshot of what you’ll see, showing red boxes around some key things.

Scroll down to read a brief description of the book, see how many users can view the book at a time (most have “unlimited user access”), and see other information about the book.
To ‘save’ it to read later in the same browsing session, click “Add to Folder” (Note that if you close the tab or window, the folder will empty.)
To read the book page by page online on the EBSCO platform, choose the “PDF full text” icon in the left menu.
To download it to read offline, or to retain it in a folder after you close your browsing session, you need to create your own personal account on EBSCOhost. To do that, click the “Sign In” link on the top bar, and create your account. (It is best practice to not use the same username or password that you use for Middlebury logins.) Once you have created an account and logged in, you can download an EBSCO e-book for up to seven days.
There are EBSCO e-book apps for Android in the Google Play Store and for iPhone in iTunes. You need to create a personal EBSCOhost account as described above (on a laptop or desktop) to use for the app.

New to the library – EBSCO e-books

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Students, faculty, and staff at Middlebury now have access to over 140,000 e-books on the EBSCO e-book platform.

Ranging from history, religion, and the sciences to poetry, languages, and the arts, these books are available from on-campus or off-campus to multiple simultaneous users.

Over the next few days, these books will become discoverable in Summon, and can be found in Midcat in a few weeks. Let us know what you think – contact your liaison or eaccess@middlebury.edu

Al-Manhal Arabic e-books and journals (trial ends August 16, 2016)

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Through mid-August, our Middlebury and Monterey campuses have trial access to this database from Al-Manhal, the only provider of full-text searchable databases of scholarly and scientific publications from the Arab and Islamic world. Al-Manhal’s over 13,000 e-books and 300 peer-reviewed journals can be searched through the user-friendly platform linked above. The full-text content is also fully indexed in Summon. (Allow a few days after this post for all Al-Manhal content to be find-able in Summon by Middlebury and MIIS users.)

Let us know what you think – email eaccess-admin@middlebury.edu or your liaison.

Looking for an Ebook You Once Saw Here?

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Has an ebook you’ve previously used disappeared from our catalog? Never fear! We’ve had to make some cutbacks at the end of the fiscal year (lots and lots of requests for new material this year), but if you need to regain access to something that no longer appears, we may be able to get you back in. Just email us the title at researchdesk@middlebury.edu, and if it’s still available to us, we’ll get you back up and running with it.