As the University grows and changes, so does the library. You know that we subscribe to lots of great databases to bring you the books and articles you need for your classes. But even so, there are many other resources available, and the people that make those databases sometimes offer free trials.  One of them is a new e-book database, The American Council of Learned Societies Humanities E-Book collection. And we would like to get your feedback on whether it would be useful for your research.

The ACLS Humanities E-Book collection offers 4,300 books in topics ranging from African American studies to Archaeology to Film and Media Studies to Folklore. Most are normal e-books with scanned images of every page, but the ACLS is adding more and more XML-text books – e-books that have interactive content like such as web links to additional resources, enlargeable images, and even multimedia including video and sound files.

To get started, just go to http://www.humanitiesebook.org and choose ‘Browse’ or ‘Search’ from top toolbar to find a book. Click on any title to see more information about it and link to the full text. You can access it on campus from any computer – if you are off campus, contact iueref@iue.edu for the trial username and password.

The ACLS Humanities E-Book collection is available for trial all this week.  Check it out and let us know what you think of it at iueref@iue.edu – your input will help us provide resources useful to your research.