Ebooks for music

ebooks@cambridge

I still remember the days when we advertised ebooks on music subjects at the Pendlebury Library by printing out all the covers on a poster and yes, they did all fit, first on an A4 and later on an A3 sheet of paper.

Example of an ebook title on Music Tripos reading list ©OUP

Nowadays the picture looks very different indeed and the University has an amazing range and variety of titles on offer. A (rather crude) search on “music” as a subject in LibrarySearch currently provides several hundred results and this excludes titles from large full text resources such as EEBO (Early English Books Online) and ECCO (Eighteenth Century Collections Online).

The content is very mixed: from individual titles for Music Tripos reading lists to current titles in packages such as Oxford Handbooks Online (Foundation collection), ACLS Humanities, University Publishing Online (including CUP and Boydell to name just a few), but also open access titles and the already mentioned full text resources covering different periods of history.

How to find your way around these? The ebooks wepage provides more or less everything you always wanted to know about ebooks, inlcuding an excellent and very informative section on ebook collections and tips on how to access these.

Only want the basics? Here they are:

• The simplest way to find and access ebooks is via LibrarySearch. (Newton does not contain recent titles.)
• You can’t find what you want? Ask a librarian or recommend a title.  Not all music titles are available as ebooks but we try to prioritise titles from Music Tripos reading lists, especially those that are at the Pendlebury Library only available in hard copy as overnight loans.
• Of course you can access ebooks remotely and 24/7. All you need is a valid Raven password.
• Once you have found a title on Library Search, simply click on the link in the “Online” field in the catalogue record for the ebook.
• Some ebooks or chapters from ebooks can be downloaded
• Ebooks@cambridge has an excellent blog

 

AP