The Higher Education Commission (HEC) has decided to provide 40,000 online books in addition to 23,000 journals that have been made available through the Digital Library Programme.
The E-books support programme will allow researchers to access most of the important text and reference books electronically on a variety of subjects.
For this purpose, the HEC has acquired 40,000 electronic books of world's leading publishers that cater to the specific needs of the public and private universities and research and development (R&D) organisations, participating in the programme.
The main objective of the whole effort is to support and strengthen the learning activities of the students. The students, faculty and staff will have the access to E-books and all of the powerful research technologies offered through this platform, says a press release here on Jun 13.
Over 220 leading international publishers have been identified for the access including Oxford University Press, Taylor and Francis, Blackwell Synergy, BMJ publishing Group, Cambridge University Press Emerald John Wiley & Sons, The McGraw Hill Book Companies, MIT Press, Springer Publishing Company, Stanford University Press and Sybex Inc, United Nations University Press etc.
It contained a collection of over 40,000 e-books in varied disciplines, such as Business and Management, Information Technology, Engineering, Health and Biomedical, Life and Physical Sciences, Social Sciences, etc.
The salient features of the service include automatic save links to highlights, bookmarks and notes and storing them in the personal bookshelves.
The bookshelves can be shared by patrons, teaching staff, and administrators end items can be deleted at anytime.
Moreover, Info Tools instantly links patrons from the full-text to other content within Ebrary databases, online resources within the subscribing library (federated search engines, ILS, dictionaries, encyclopaedias, and third party databases), information on the web such as definitions, translations, maps and web search engines.
Info Tools also allows patrons to highlight, annotate bookmark, print, copy and paste text from any document into any text application, complete with customisable bibliographical citations. The browsing options include navigating pages in the book with the requested search terms.
The service has user-friendly searching options. It includes searching everything in a book by entering text in one field, refining search results using the search results page, searching for words and phrases that are close to each other and exploring from within a bock, resources In the library, and on the web.