E-book. (Photo courtesy of Vikas Pawar on unsplash.com)

By Susan Turkel

We know you miss roaming the Falvey stacks and seeing, smelling, and touching all of those ink-on-paper books. We miss them, too! But the library can still provide you with countless hours of research and reading pleasure, thanks to bountiful collections of e-books!

Permanent e-book collections

Believe it or not, Falvey’s catalog includes around a million e-books! To find an e-book, simply enter your search terms (author, title, subject words, etc.) into our Search Everything box (above). Click Books & Media, and then limit your results to Collection=Online. You can also view the Articles & More page for your search, then limit your results to Format=eBook.

Our e-book collection is diverse and ever-growing. The million books listed in our catalog range from Early English Books Online (virtually every work printed in England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales, and British North America and works in English printed elsewhere from 1473 to 1700) to the entire collection of Safari e-books on software, networking, and other techy subjects ,including more than 11,000 published within the last five years.

A recent book from Oxford Scholarship Online

Falvey recently purchased the entire (and growing!) collection of e-books published by Oxford University Press and delivered to you on the Oxford Scholarship Online platform. These books include titles in the social sciences and humanities, and at last count we had more than 16,000 in our catalog. Nearly 100 new items are added every month!

For more information about our current e-book collections and how to make use of them, visit our guide to using E-books at Villanova.

Temporary access to MORE e-book collections

Several publishers have opened up their entire catalog of e-books for access to non-subscribers during the current crisis. We are grateful for the increased access to important scholarly works, given that all the print books we’ve purchased over the years are currently “out of circulation.” These publishers include MIT Press, ScienceDirect, and many academic presses through the Project Muse platform.

MIT Press search page

In addition, you can find more than 30,000 titles on all subjects in the expanded University Press Scholarship Online. This package includes works from the University of California Press, Columbia University Press, Princeton University Press, Stanford University Press, University of Chicago Press, Yale and Stanford University Presses, and NYU Press among many others.

See the Temporarily Available Online Resources page for a more complete list.

Getting help

Still have questions? Please feel free to reach out to Falvey via Live Chat or by emailing ref@villanova.edu. Librarians and staff are available 9 a.m.–5 p.m., Monday–Friday.

To stay up-to-date on Falvey’s resources at this time, please visit our Falvey Memorial Library COVID-19 Updates and Resources webpage. The Falvey Virtual Library is always open and here to support you.

Susan Turkel is a Social Sciences Librarian at Falvey Memorial Library.

Photo of Selma to Montgomery March from WikiCommons

By Susan Turkel

Lunch counter sit-ins, the Montgomery bus boycott, church and temple bombings, the murders of Emmett Till and Martin Luther King Jr., school integration, the March on Washington…. The events surrounding the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s forever changed American society.

Falvey Memorial Library offers 400 books on the Civil Rights Movement and hundreds more on race relations over the course of American history. Scholars continue to produce books, articles, and documentaries on this important era.

Research on history requires access to primary source materials. The Civil Rights Digital Library (CRDL) provides free access to a wide variety of primary source documents, photographic images, television news archives, and instructional materials held by hundreds of libraries, archives, and other organizations.

Funded by a National Leadership Grant for Libraries awarded by the Institute of Museum and Library Services, CRDL began as a partnership between libraries, archives, and educational institutions. The list of organizations whose materials are accessible via CRDL is lengthy and impressive; it includes the Library of Congress, universities and law schools from all over the country, PBS, the FBI, city and state archives from all over the South, and the Carnegie Museum of Art. CRDL was unveiled to the public in 2008.

In addition to the primary source resources, CRDL offers a wide variety of teaching materials on the Civil Rights Movement, including learning modules, bibliographies, lesson plans, timelines, quizzes, and worksheets.

If you’d like to investigate additional library resources for studying the Civil Rights Movement, please visit the U.S. Black Freedom Movement course guide, developed by our history librarian Jutta Seibert.

Happy searching!

Susan Turkel, MA, MLS, is a Social Sciences Librarian at Falvey Memorial Library.

Image courtesy of Pixabay via pexels.com

By Susan Turkel

Have you seen announcements for Falvey Brown Bags, but found that you couldn’t attend due to scheduling conflicts? No worries—we will bring the brown bag to you!

Library Workshops and Presentations request form

The librarians at Falvey invite you to request a workshop on journal publishing, data visualization, citation management, fair use, or any of a host of other topics. Check out our offerings, or suggest a topic of your own!

Our “on demand” workshops can be customized to your needs. The time and place are flexible as well: we can host the workshop at the library, or we can bring the show on the road and meet with your group at your location on campus.

We’re happy to present to your lab group, your class, or a gathering of your colleagues.

Of course, our subject librarians are also happy to present a course-related information literacy instruction session; fill out this form or reach out to your librarian directly.

We look forward to working with you!

Susan Turkel, MA, MLS, is a Social Sciences Librarian at Falvey Memorial Library.

By Susan Turkel

The Library has recently purchased online access to Oxford Scholarship Online, a full-text collection of ebooks published by Oxford University Press.

This growing collection includes more than 16,000 titles in 20 subject areas, and covers books published from 1963 through the present. Nearly 100 new items are added to the database every month.

Oxford Scholarship Online offers books in these 20 subject areas

You can find these Oxford ebooks by searching the Falvey catalog for “Oxford Scholarship Online” as the author. You can also access the Oxford Scholarship Online database directly and search for words from the full text, author, title, and more.

Oxford Scholarship Online ebooks may be viewed on screen or downloaded as PDF on a chapter by chapter basis. For help using Oxford University Press ebooks, as well as ebooks from a variety of publishers, visit our guide on ebooks at Villanova.

You can find Oxford Scholarship Online—and a wide variety of other online digital collections provided by the Library—on our Databases A-Z page.

Susan Turkel is a Social Sciences Librarian at Falvey Memorial Library.