E-Book Collections are taking off in libraries and private subscriptions, but how to they compare? What follows is a work in progress based on perceptions of the Librarians at Drexel University’s Hagerty Library of the e-book platforms we use. It was created for a presentation to faculty about the growing e-book options available through the Library as part of the Institute on Innovation in Training and Teaching conducted by the Drexel Office of Information Resources and Technology, September 10-11, 2009.  (starting at slide 72)

E-Book Collections	In a Nutshell	Pros	Cons
	141 Medicine & Science Items	Lots of core medical textbooks, good graphics & basic definitions	No downloads, hard to print, must be online to use.
	8,284 Business & InfoTech Items in HTML	Depth of IT books in the “ITPro” collection.	No downloads, hard to print, must be online to use.
	32,000 Items on All topics	Breadth of collection. “PDF-like” hi-fidelity.	No downloads, hard to print, must be online to use.
	???	It’s free.	Some downloads, hard to print, must be online to use. Omits pages.
	1,576 Engineering Items in PDF	Depth of data in the handbooks. True PDF’s are downloadable.
	3,688 Engineering Items in PDF	Depth of data in the handbooks. True PDF’s are downloadable.
	18,643 Business & InfoTech Items in HTML	Breadth of collection . Not much else.	No downloads, hard to print, must be online to use.
	923 InfoTech Items in HTML	Core IT manuals from all main publishers. Code search option.	No downloads, hard to print, must be online to use.

Please help us evaluate Drexel’s electronic book collections and fill in the blanks below. Use the comment feature or email comments to siftar@drexel.edu.

Coming soon! A comparison of features in the following open-source EBook platforms…

ACLS Humanities Ebooks
Alex Catalog of Electronic Texts
Baen Free Library
Bartleby.com
Bibliomania
Eighteenth Century Collections Online
Free On-line Library
Health Information for International Travel 2008
Internet Archive Texts
Internet History Sourcebooks Project
Internet Public Library On Line Texts
Online Library of Literature
Perseus Digital Library
Project Gutenberg
University of California Press eScholarship Editions
University of Pennsylvania On-Line Books Library
University of Virginia Electronic Text Center

Here’s a note from our Reserve Book Room Supervisor:

Dear Members of the Faculty,

It’s that time again – time to submit your reserve requests for the fall quarter!

Complete instructions for placing materials on reserve, including blank reserve request forms can be found here. Please feel free to contact me, Jeanne Hamann with any additional questions.

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