Discovering E-books > 4: ebrary

4A: ebrary Overview

ebrary is a resource containing the full-text of thousands of e-books on many topics. You can search the full text of all books or a specific book, print, and even save books on your own "bookshelf" for later use. Note that some ebrary books may be available to only one user at a time. You may need to wait until another user has finished viewing a book.

One important thing to know about ebrary is that you'll need to install a special ebrary reader in order to browse, search, and use other advanced features. Read more about the ebrary reader.

4B: Searching ebrary

• Boolean Searching:
• Broaden or narrow your searching using AND, OR, or NOT
• Use AND between terms where you want ALL terms to appear. Example: physics AND astronomy
• Use OR between terms where you want ANY of the terms to appear. Example: Britain OR England
• Use NOT before a term you do not want to appear. Example: sound NOT music



• Phrases: Put quotation marks around phrases. Example: "United Kingdom"
• Plurals: Use OR to search for plurals. Example: planet OR planets
• Proximity: Use WITHIN-# to indicate the proximity of words, where # is within how many words you want them to be together, 1 being used for words next to each other. Example: Margaret WITHIN-5 Thatcher will find results where Margaret and Thatcher appear within 5 words of each other.
• Use the Advanced search to specify where search terms appear (text, subject, title, author, publisher), indicate the language of the item, and specify an item type (note: most items OSU has access to are books).

4B: Viewing a Book

Note the InfoTools menu (the dashed line shows you an image of the available options). You can use this to translate, get definitions, search, and more!

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