New e-Book catalogue

Today we launched the Lib4RI E-Book Catalogue. In this new catalogue you will find (almost) all of our 220,000 licensed and purchased e-books. This is a great improvement as up to now only a modest proportion of our e-books have been visible in the NEBIS catalogue. Furthermore, we can keep the new e-book catalogue up-to-date on a day-to-day basis and all e-books contained are actually accessible for the Lib4RI users.

This is a major change in our search box since the book search system we had in place in the first 5 years of Lib4RI was the NEBIS catalogue by default. If you are looking for print books, you can conveniently switch back to the NEBIS catalogue by clicking on the «NEBIS – print books» button in Lib4RI’s Searchbox.

The intended main use of the Lib4RI E-Book Catalogue is to search for specific e-books, but of course topic searches are also possible. Besides complete e-books, the Lib4RI E-Book Catalogue will also locate single e-book chapters if their metadata are available. To improve the search experience, the catalogue features limiters to restrict the time frame of the search results or the subject area.

The discovery system used for the new catalogue is EBSCO EDS (Ebsco Discovery Service). The metadata in EDS come either directly from the publishers or from other catalogues. EDS is a metasearch engine that was originally designed to search for all kinds of media, which subsequently made modifications for the Lib4RI E-Book Catalogue necessary. A great advantage of EDS was that the implementation of the Lib4RI linkresolver went very smoothly.

After a preliminary preparation period this new feature is now ready for its release in a beta version and we hope that the Lib4RI users will appreciate the design and functionalities of the new catalogue. If you have questions or comments about it or you encounter any access problems, we are happy to receive feedback via the feedback form or directly per email at @email.