By Darren G. Poley

During this time of necessary remoteness, it has been fortuitous that the Villanova University community can access so many e-books via the Library. In fact, Falvey’s online collection has well over a million e-books that are available to students and faculty alike.

Many publishers today produce e-books alongside their print offerings, but what about slightly older books which were previously only sold as physical items? Some academic publishers are working to remedy the situation by making available electronic versions of books still in high demand that were published in the last forty years, and in some cases even longer ago.

A couple of prominent examples are Oxford University Press and Taylor & Francis. Some more specialized ones are the Wiley Online Library and the Loeb Classical Library Online by Harvard University Press.

Bloomsbury, in addition to being a notable independent publisher since the 1980s, over the last decade has been acquiring other UK book publishers well-respected in the humanities. It now aggregates books from Bloomsbury Academic, I. B. Tauris, Bristol Classical Press, and Continuum International, which includes books by T&T Clark, Burns & Oates, and Cassell.

Recently Falvey Memorial Library has gained access to several e-book collections, and although each individual e-book will be added to the Library’s catalog of holdings, below is a list of the newly acquired Bloomsbury Collections, which can be browsed or searched using keywords.
 

• Ancient History Archive 1983-2012
• Ancient Philosophy Archive 1984-2012
• Biblical Studies Landmark Texts (Bloomsbury Academic Collections)
• Christian Doctrines Archive 1988-2013
• Christology Archive 1982-2011
• Classical Literature Archive 1994-2012
• Continental Philosophy Archive 2000-2012
• B. Tauris Biblical Studies & Theology Archive
• B. Tauris Religious Studies Archive 1993-2015
• International Critical Commentary 1901-2014
• Pauline Studies Archive 1984-2012
• Philosophy Landmark Texts (Bloomsbury Academic Collections)
• Religious Studies Landmark Texts (Bloomsbury Academic Collections)
• Theology collections 2013-2018

If you want to browse or search across collections by subject and keyword, you can do that, too. Just be sure to limit your results to e-books for which we have access. Otherwise, you will get records for e-books to which we do not have access. Note: Bloomsbury also has an interdisciplinary Open Access Collection.

Some e-book platforms aggregate content from a variety of publishers, such as the EBSCO eBook Collection and JSTOR. There are even a few very good open access online aggregators for books no longer in copyright; Hathi Trust Digital Library, Internet Archive, and even our own Distinctive Collections: Digital Library.

Darren G. Poley is Associate Director of Research Services and Scholarly Engagement, and Theology, Humanities & Classical Studies Librarian at Falvey Memorial Library.