Library Guides
Increasingly, publishers are producing books in digital format either instead of, or as well as the printed edition. The university subscribes to over 2500 electronic books (ebooks) and the number is constantly rising. Dawsonera is the University's main supplier of ebooks and contains many of the key texts on your reading lists, although we also have a collection through Ebsco ebooks (formerly NetLibrary), and various reference collections such as Credo Reference and Oxford Reference Online.
Staff and students have access to these collections both within the University and from home; use your university username and password to log in. (See our help page on services from home.) Our ebooks can be viewed online for as long as you like, but, as with printed books, there are limitations on how much you can print from them. Dawsonera titles can be downloaded for up to three days and there is no limit on the number of people who can view each title at any one time. Ebsco ebooks can only be read by one person at a time.
Our ebooks are all listed in our catalogue in the same way as the printed books. You can access them by doing a search on the library catalogue just like a "normal" book. To search for ebooks alone, go to the catalogue advanced search page and set "material type" to "ebooks".
Ebooks have the advantage that you can search across the whole text of every book in the main textbook collections for information on your topic, rather than having to rely on what is in the catalogue record, which often doesn’t list contents. To see a full list of ebook packages select the Digital Library tab from the home page of the library catalogue, then select the menu entitled "Ebook collections". If you then select either Dawsonera or EBSCO ebook collection from the drop-down menu, you will get a search box where you can type in your keywords.
Dawsonera provides access to over 2,500 ebooks in a variety of subjects. All titles are linked on the library catalogue.
EBSCO ebook collection There are 3,400 publically accessible e-books and approximately 340 to which the University of Bedfordshire has a subscription. The subject and content of these e-books reflect the full range of disciplines taught and researched at the University of Bedfordshire. All titles are linked on the library catalogue
Gale Virtual Reference Library - collection of 15 business strategy and management titles published by Kogan Page.
Business Source Premier and SocIndex are primarily databases of journal articles but also contain the full text of some books. If you wish to retrieve only books from your search then select 'books' from the ‘Publication Type’ menu.
Credo Reference is a digital library of around 300 reference books covering a wide range of subjects. You can search the whole database or just a group of titles. It could be the ideal source when you want to check a fact, define a theory or retrieve a good quotation for a presentation.
Oxford Reference Online provides access to over 175 reference works on different subjects.
