Category Archives: Electronic Books

Texas universities join forces to negotiate their future

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New coalition seeks lower costs and greater access to research.

Twenty-seven universities across Texas have joined forces as the Texas Library Coalition for United Action (TLCUA) to think creatively about access to faculty publications and the sustainability of journal subscriptions. TLCUA has organized to identify the best way to change current models and the relationships between academic institutions and publishers. The goals of the Coalition are ambitious – improved access to scholarship, greater control over faculty content, and pricing models that are sustainable for strained library budgets in higher education. 

The sustainability of providing scholarly research at ever-increasing costs is putting these academic libraries in difficult positions as they work to offer access to scholars on their campuses.  

“We are nearing a tipping point where we can no longer continue under the current business model,” said Sara Lowman, Vice Provost & University Librarian at Rice University and chair of the Coalition Steering Committee. “We want to come up with solutions that benefit everyone involved: the taxpayers and others who fund our research, the professors who conduct the research, the publishers who disseminate our research findings, and people around the world who benefit from research conducted in Texas.”  

Technology has provided greater opportunities for wider availability of resources, and the Coalition wants those opportunities to be reflected in agreements that will benefit all academic libraries whether public or private, urban or rural. 

The Coalition has begun its mission by entering into dialog with academic publisher Elsevier. They hope that through positive engagement and mutual understanding, an improved and sustainable model for the dissemination of scholarship can be achieved. 

“We value the content in Elsevier journals and look forward to working with Elsevier to come to a mutually beneficial agreement,” Lowman said. 

Elsevier is the world’s largest publisher of scholarly work, with 70 offices in 24 countries. It publishes 2,500 journals, including The Lancet and Cell, covering topics in medicine, biology, psychology, business, and more. Elsevier has been involved in a number of negotiations with US universities recently, including the University of California system, California State University, Carnegie Mellon University, Louisiana State University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Washington University in St. Louis. 

The Coalition institutions collectively have more than 397,000 students and 25,000 faculty. Their Elsevier subscriptions represent a significant investment estimated at over $20 million. By these and other measures, the Coalition represents one of the largest and most diverse U.S. collective negotiation consortia of its kind. 

The current members of the Texas Library Coalition for United Action are: 

  • Angelo State University 
  • Baylor University 
  • Lamar University 
  • Prairie View A&M University 
  • Rice University 
  • Sam Houston State University 
  • Stephen F. Austin University 
  • Sul Ross State University 
  • Tarleton State University 
  • Texas A&M International University 
  • Texas A&M University (College Station) 
  • Texas A&M University-Central Texas 
  • Texas A&M University-Commerce 
  • Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi 
  • Texas A&M University-Kingsville 
  • Texas A&M University-San Antonio 
  • Texas A&M University-Texarkana 
  • Texas State University 
  • Texas Tech University (Lubbock) 
  • Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center El Paso 
  • Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center Lubbock 
  • University of Dallas 
  • University of Houston 
  • University of Houston Clear Lake 
  • University of Houston Downtown 
  • The University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center 
  • West Texas A&M University 

New “Fire and Freedom” traveling poster exhibition at South Campus Library

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The UT Southwestern Health Sciences Digital Library & Learning Center is hosting Fire and Freedom: Food and Enslavement in Early America, a new six-panel traveling exhibition. Meals can tell us how power is exchanged between and among different peoples, races, genders, and classes. The 18th century collection materials—upon which the exhibition is based—describe connections between food, botany, health, and housekeeping.

The exhibition will be on display for the UT Southwestern community until May 19, 2018. In addition to this physical exhibition, other publicly-available online components include web pages for each of the six panels, higher education class modules, a curator’s bibliography, and a digital gallery.

One of the medical history books listed in the curator’s bibliography—Blanton, Wyndham B. Medicine in Virginia in the Eighteenth Century. Richmond, VA: Garrett and Massie, 1931—is available at the Joint Library Facility and can be requested by UT Southwestern faculty, staff, and students at no cost through Interlibrary Loan. It is also available as an ebook through HathiTrust and can be viewed page by page without logging in; to download the ebook as a PDF for offline reading, simply log in using a UT Southwestern username and password.

The National Library of Medicine, National Institutes of Health developed and produced this exhibition. Research assistance was provided by staff at The Washington Library at George Washington’s Mount Vernon. It was guest curated by Psyche Williams-Forson, Ph.D., Associate Professor and Chair, American Studies, University of Maryland College Park.

Resources on demand using Wiley Article Select Tokens

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Over the past few years, the Library implemented and subsidized a pilot project to allow single, pay-per-view access to non-subscribed Wiley content. This overview describes the service and summarizes best practices for use based on project outcomes.

What is the Wiley Article Select Token service?

Wiley’s Article Select Token service is a pay-for-view option that allows users instant, 24/7 access to non-subscribed content seamlessly. Periodically, the Library purchases a set amount of tokens, which allows any authorized user from one of our reported campus IP addresses to “spend” a single token for a single journal article/book chapter/unit. To make access as easy as possible, we implemented the least restrictive control option. Users can seamlessly download Wiley content without any intervention by staff.

A user will see this message if an Article Select Token is required: “Select the confirm option to access the material. All users at University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas will have access to this material for 24 hours.”

What material is available through the Wiley Article Select Token service?

  • Journal back files collection (pre-1997 content for 1,600+ journals)
  • Over 18,000 online books
  • 185 major reference works
  • Current Protocols Laboratory Methods

Selected journals and reference works are specifically excluded from this service due to third party societies’ or publishers’ restrictions.

What “best practices” can users take to help conserve available Wiley tokens?

Since the Wiley Article Select Token service requires Library budgetary support (average token fee is $19.00), we have identified a few best practice guidelines based on behavioral patterns identified during the pilot project.

  • Download your article/chapter/unit and save it locally once you confirm use through a token. Downloading ensures that you won’t need to use a second or third token to re-access the same content at some future date.
  • Consider using ILL (interlibrary loan) If you need multiple chapters from a book. A single token allows access to a single chapter. Compare the cost of five requests using routine interlibrary loan ($25.00) versus the cost of the same five requests using the token service ($95.00).
  • Try to coordinate access if you know that multiple users will need access to the same material. A single token provides unlimited concurrent user access to material for a 24-hour period.

Next steps for the Library:

The Wiley Article Select Tokens pilot period has provided indisputable evidence of both user need and campus cost benefit. The breadth of content being used is exceptional, and users have embraced the easy accessibility and speed of this service. We’ve been extremely pleased with the outcomes to date. We expect to spend less than the subscription costs that would be involved to add requested materials, and users gain immediate access to an expanded amount of content.

We will continue to assess whether this approach could serve as an effective long-term, supplementary (and economical) collection strategy to the expanding number of expensive materials that are routinely requested.

If you have any questions or feedback about this pilot, please contact Mori Lou Higa at mori.lou.higa@utsouthwestern.edu or 214 648-2989.

Prices change for Interlibrary Loan on July 1

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Beginning July 1, 2017, all affiliated clients will be charged for all Interlibrary Loan requests. This change, which was recommended by the Library Advisory Committee and supported by the Dean’s Office, will mark the first time that the UT Southwestern Library has ever charged students, residents, and fellows for regularly delivered materials.

The pricing model will look like this:

Delivery Speed Cost per Item
*(Affiliated)		 Cost per Item
**(Not Affiliated)
Regular
(2-10 Days)		 $5.00 $13.00
Rush
(By the end of next business day)
Not available for book requests		 $15.00 $60.00

Please note: We will continue to provide materials – both books and articles listed in our catalog at the Joint Library Facility (JLF) – at no cost for a regular delivery.

This change is being made for two main reasons:

  • Decline in state revenue funding
  • UTSW clients making requests for items to which we already have access

In 2016, approximately one in every three InterLibrary Loan requests were for documents that UTSW clients can currently access.  To remind clients to first look to see if the Library has access to their articles before placing the request, we have recently added links to Ejournals A to Z and related tutorials and PubMed on the ILLiad login page.

Once this policy takes effect, Library staff will cancel article requests that can be obtained through Ejournals A to Z to help save our clients money.

New year brings new skills!

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aceIs learning a new skill on your list of New Year’s resolutions? Do you want to get organized, reduce stress, or manage time differently in 2017? The UT Southwestern Health Sciences Digital Library & Learning Center can help with that!

More than 22,000 training books and modules housed in the Academy of Career Enhancement’s Books 24×7 collection are available through the Library catalog and includes a variety of topics including project management, time management, work-life balance, stress reduction, and organizational effectiveness. By using the Library catalog to access the entire Books 24×7 collection, you may dive further into a particular topic via the sidebar. Once you locate an item of interest, simply click on the online access link and use your campus log-in to continue. You can quickly jump to particular chapters, take notes, create bookmarks, and more.

This collection – part of the Academy of Career Enhancement (ACE) – is provided to the UT Southwestern community through an enterprise license of online resources for the continuing development and engagement of the UT Southwestern workforce. The multi-year contract is funded by several campus departments, including the Office of Human Resources.

Color, share, and celebrate Picture Book Month in November!

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An 1835 illustration featured in the National Library of Medicine’s #ColorOurCollections Coloring Book.

Art Therapy, Adult Coloring Books and Your Mental Health

According to the American Art Therapy Association, art therapy is a mental health profession in which the process of making and creating artwork is used to “explore feelings, reconcile emotional conflicts, foster self-awareness, manage behavior and addictions, develop social skills, improve reality orientation, reduce anxiety and increase self-esteem.”

The Health Benefits of Adult Coloring Books

Despite the fact that coloring and art therapy aren’t quite the same thing, coloring does offer a slew of mental benefits. Coloring definitely has therapeutic potential to reduce anxiety, create focus, or bring [about] more mindfulness. Groundbreaking research in 2005 proved anxiety levels dropped when subjects colored mandalas, which are round frames with geometric patterns inside. Simply doodling, though, had no effect in reducing the other subjects’ stress levels.

Just like meditation, coloring also allows us to switch off our brains from other thoughts and focus only on the moment, helping to alleviate free-floating anxiety. It can be particularly effective for people who aren’t comfortable with more creatively expressive forms of art. Now get coloring!

The South and North Campus Branch Libraries will have coloring stations with crayons and pages of science and medical related material for you to enjoy this month.

Download these free science and medical-related coloring books featured at the Library coloring tables this month:

Follow the Library’s Facebook or Twitter page for a daily page to color from these collections.

AMA Manual of Style Online now available

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AMAStyleiconA newly-purchased resource, AMA Manual of Style Online, is now available for campus-wide unlimited use. This web-based resource, maintained by Oxford University Press (OUP), hosts the full digital version of the popular manual, AMA Manual of Style, 10th edition, 2007, published by the American Medical Association (AMA).

Additional online features include style quizzes, conversion calculators, blog and Twitter feeds, and everything needed to produce well-organized and clear manuscripts.

Users can create personal profiles to save content and searches for future visits.

Getting started with HathiTrust

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HathiTrustlogoUT Southwestern is now the newest participant in the partnership between HathiTrust and The University of Texas System. HathiTrust is a large-scale collaborative repository of digital content from research libraries. In addition to millions of books, HathiTrust content includes many government publications, journal titles in a wide range of areas, theses and dissertations, conference materials, statistics, and more.

Members can create or edit public or private collections within HathiTrust. Collection permalinks make these useful additions to education or research. Members are also able to download a wide variety of items in “full view”, which allows a user to read content offline or take notes via printing or direct PDF annotation and markup.

Creating or editing collections and downloading complete items in “full view” requires a member login. To log into HathiTrust, select “University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center” from the list of partner institutions, and use your UT Southwestern username and password.

Be aware that items with “Limited (search only)” view are not available to UT Southwestern users through HathiTrust. They may be available through other library resources. Check the catalog for alternate availability and, if needed, order through Interlibrary Loan.

It is not required to log into HathiTrust to search or read “full view” content online; it is only required in order to create/edit a collection or download a complete “full view” item.

To locate items that are available as “full view” in HathiTrust:

  • Check the “full view only” box on the home page of HathiTrust before beginning a search.
  • In advanced catalog search, check the “full view only” box.
  • Within search results, there are two tabs; select the “Only full view tab as needed”.

HathiTrust provides many options for browsing and finding content quickly. A page view, thumbnail view, a page scrollbar, and a search box make it easy to go through content within an item. A mobile view is also available when using a mobile device—no app is required for HathiTrust.

Need help getting started with HathiTrust? Check the help area within HathiTrust, or contact the Library Archives with further questions.

Five new ebook collections now available

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The UT Southwestern Health Sciences Digital Library & Learning Center is now providing access for our users to five new ebook collections:

You can also search the Library Catalog for title, author, publication date, or subject.  A direct link on the catalog page will take users directly to publisher eBooks platforms.

Important tip about ebook platforms : Ebook platforms are as varied as the evening sunset: some are awesome, while others are average; some offer mobile accessibility, while others don’t; and some permit downloading and printing of chapters in PDF, while others only allow online viewing as a web page. No two platforms are alike; however, most provide the option to create a personal account for ease of use and to facilitate searching.

"Download limits": what you need to know about licensing agreements

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Note: Survey is no longer active.

The UT Southwestern Health Sciences Digital Library and Learning Center provides access to many electronic resources (e.g., databases, electronic journals, etc.), and the use of these resources is governed by license agreements with vendors or publishers. Systematic or excessive downloading from an electronic resource is explicitly prohibited and may result in loss of our institutional access.

EZproxy has built-in restrictions to prevent the systematic harvesting of content by robots or other spoof mechanisms. The download limit is 100 megabytes (MB) within a 15-minute period of time. This limit could possibly be hit during normal downloading of content, so it does not necessarily suggest any illicit action on the user’s part.  When the download limit is exceeded, the user’s account is suspended for two hours, and the following message displays:

Our Library resource vendors have stipulations for the amount of content that can be downloaded by a user within a certain time period. Unfortunately, you have exceeded your download limit of 100 MB within a 15 minute time frame. Your suspension will expire in 2 hours. If you frequently receive this message, please contact the Library at Liberesources@utsouthwestern.edu. We apologize for any inconvenience.

An investigation is currently underway to assure that we prevent abuse of Library resources while minimizing any disruption of authorized usage. If you have experienced this download limit message, please fill out this brief Survey Monkey questionnaire about your experience  so we can better troubleshoot the current process.

If you have any questions or concerns, please contact us by email at Liberesources@utsouthwestern.edu.