The South Carolina State Library is pleased to announce the addition of more than 87,000 academic ebook titles to its online collection. Joining the Alaska State Library and the Missouri State Library, the library is now the third state library in the country to subscribe to ebrary's Academic Complete collection of research-oriented ebooks.
The South Carolina State Library's Academic Complete subscription offers cardholders access to many subjects ranging from agriculture and history to science and technology. The two largest areas of the collection are the social sciences with over 25,000 titles and business & economics with more than 17,000 titles.
Hulen E. Bivins, Director of the South Carolina State Library said, "The inclusion of these new e-book titles, combined with materials presently available in the state library's collection, provide the library user a wide range of quality sources to perform a broad range of inquiries with both efficiency and accuracy."
According to Chris Yates, Director of Information Strategies, "We have also included access to 19,000 PDA (patron driven acquisition) eligible titles which means patrons will be able to recommend ebooks for our library to purchase." Patron Driven Acquisition is an ideal way increase access to vast numbers of titles of the library's choice, and only purchase if they are used. Once titles are triggered, the library owns a perpetual archive.
To meet researchers' evolving needs, ebrary now has two dedicated mobile apps -- one for the iPad®, iPhone®, and iPod touch® and one for Android™. Both free apps provide an optimized way to experience authoritative content -- both online and offline -- from multiple sources.
ebrary, a ProQuest business, is the biggest distributor in the academic library market, thanks to the "sheer volume of content that we have," says Leslie Lees, vice president of content development. Kathy Masnik, vice president of product management, echoes that statement, noting that ebrary is "squarely in the research space," though the company does offer titles for public libraries that are research-oriented.
ebrary was founded in 1999 and began aggregating ebooks directly to libraries using a subscription model, the only model in the industry at the time. ProQuest acquired the company in 2011.
