Category Archives: Services

New Library Service: Digitize This Book

The Duke University Libraries are pleased to announce a new digitization-on-demand service that lets you have out-of-copyright books scanned and delivered to you digitally for free.

Internet Archive Scribe
From stacks to scanner to your inbox. We’re piloting a new service to digitize public domain books for Duke users on demand.

digitize_this_book2Starting this semester, Duke University faculty, students, and staff can request to have certain public domain books scanned on demand. If a book is published before 1923* and located in the Perkins, Bostock, Lilly, or Music Library or in the Library Service Center (LSC), a green “Digitize This Book” button (pictured here) will appear in its online catalog record. Clicking on this button starts the request.

Within two weeks (although likely sooner), you will get an email with a link to the digitized book in the Duke University Libraries collections on the Internet Archive. You—and the rest of the world—can now read this book online, download it to your Kindle, export it as a PDF, or get it as a fully searchable text-only file. And you never have to worry about late fees or recalls!

Throughout the spring semester, Duke University Libraries will be testing how this service works and tweaking the process. Pending the results of this pilot, we hope to expand this service to other library materials and users.

So give it a try, and let us know what you think! Email us directly at digitizebook@duke.edu. If you have questions, feel free as always to ask a librarian.

For answers to some Frequently Asked Questions about the “Digitize This Book” service, visit the Duke University Libraries + Digital Scholarship site.

*Because of copyright restrictions, only books published before 1923 that have entered the public domain are eligible for this service.

Welcome to Our Redesigned Library Website!

redesigned library website launch
Click on the screenshot to visit our new library website!

Notice anything different? Our library website has a new look!

After soft-launching the site on October 14 and doing extensive back-end testing in the meantime, we’re excited to roll out the new library.duke.edu today.

We’ve been developing, testing, and documenting our website redesign for a year, and we greatly appreciate all the feedback our users have given us along the way. Your input (and patience) has helped us design a better, simpler, more intuitively organized site for Duke students, faculty, and researchers. 

Here are some highlights of what’s new and improved:

Take a look around and let us know what you think. Use our feedback form to tell us how we’re doing or report a problem or issue.

You can also share your comments and thoughts with us on Facebook or Twitter.

 

New Website Coming Fall 2013!

Duke University Libraries is redesigning our website to improve your online experience!

 

What will change?

We’re improving access from all devices.  The homepage, headers, footers, and navigation will undergo the following revisions:

  • Faster access to the most commonly used resources
  • Optimized display for most screen resolutions
  • Greater accessibility for users who rely on assistive software

 

Will anything remain the same?

The catalog and other search interfaces are not part of this redesign, so their functionality will remain the same. These interfaces will, however, adopt the newly redesigned headers and footers used throughout the site.

 

When will the change take place?

We are targeting Fall 2013 to launch the redesigned site.

 

After the new site is published, will I be able to get to content on the old site?

After the new site is in production, we will archive the old site in DukeSpace, the university’s open-access repository.

 

How can I get involved?

As we develop prototypes of web pages, we will post screenshots on this blog for you to review and send comments. We will also periodically test screens in-person at the Bryan Center and other campus locations. We will announce these opportunities for you to participate a week in advance so you can join us in the Bryan Center and help guide the redesign.

 

We look forward to working with you to improve our library website. If you have questions or concerns, please contact Debra Kurtz, Head of Digital Experience Services

Interlibrary Loan Temporarily Unavailable During Winter Break

 

SERVICE INTERRUPTION NOTICE

 

During the upcoming academic winter break (December 17-January 8), Perkins, Law, and Ford libraries will be moving interlibrary loan operations from a locally hosted computer server to OCLC, a non-profit computer service and research organization.

As part of this transfer of service, all data associated with document delivery operations (ILLiad) will need to be transferred to OCLC. To prepare library files for this transfer, we will be shutting down access to our local interlibrary loan service on the morning of Friday, December 14. OCLC will begin building the interlibrary loan files on their computers on Monday, December 17, a process they expect to take a few days.

During this process, neither library staff nor library patrons will have access to their ILLiad accounts or files, and all system functionality will be inaccessible for transaction processing. Please plan ahead for requesting materials. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause and thank you for your patience as we work to update our system.

Libraries Dramatically Expand Ebook Offerings

Image by Maximilian Schönherr, Wikimedia Commons

Duke library users and Duke alumni will soon have a trove of new ebooks at their fingertips.

Approximately 1,500 scholarly monographs by Oxford University Press and its affiliates are now available as ebooks in the library catalog, with approximately 9,000 more to come later this year.

The development is part of an innovative deal brokered by Oxford University Press and the Triangle Research Libraries Network consortium (TRLN).

The ebooks are fully searchable and allow for unlimited user access, so that multiple people can read them at the same time. In addition, one shared print copy of each humanities and social science title will be held at Duke’s Library Service Center and be available for use by all TRLN institutions (Duke, UNC-Chapel Hill, NCSU, NCCU).

“The partnership allows for expanded access to scholarly material, with less overlap, at a lower cost to each TRLN institution,” says Aisha Harvey, Head of Collection Development at Duke University Libraries. “It also gives researchers the option of using a print or digital copy, depending on their personal preference.”

This access agreement is one of the first of its kind to allow shared e-book access among cooperating libraries. Another noteworthy aspect is that the ebooks will be fully available to all Duke alumni. Most ebooks in the Libraries’ collection are not accessible to alumni, due to copyright and licensing restrictions. But the new arrangement expands the Libraries’ offerings to Duke graduates. (A variety of library services and resources are already available for free to all Duke alumni, including some of our most popular databases.)

“The Triangle Research Libraries Network has a very long history of successful collaboration in building print collections,” said Sarah Michalak, University Librarian and Associate Provost at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and chair of the TRLN Executive Committee.

Last year, with support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, TRLN sponsored a “Beyond Print” summit to explore opportunities and challenges associated with ebook acquisitions and shared institutional access. The ebook deal with Oxford University Press is one outcome of those discussions.

“The agreement with OUP offers a welcome opportunity to experiment with approaches discussed at the summit, provide high-quality content to our users, and learn more about how students and researchers want to access scholarly output in a dual electronic-plus-print environment,” said Michalak.

Ebook and ejournal usage continues to rise in academic libraries across the country. In 2011, the Duke Libraries adopted an ebook advocacy model in order to guide collection decisions and advocate to publishers on behalf of researchers’ needs.

Alerts & Outages: ILLiad Service Interuption July 21

Please bear with us with we upgrade ILLiad!
(Photo by channah via stock.xchng)

On Saturday morning, July 21, approximately between 8:00 and 11:00 a.m., the Duke University Libraries will be performing an upgrade to the server which hosts ILLiad, our interlibrary loan program.  The operation is planned to take two hours, and during this time users will not be able to access their interlibrary loan accounts.

We apologize for any inconvenience and thank you for your patience while we upgrade our system.