ebrary Knowledge Base

Setting up alerts when new ebrary titles match your criteria

Want to be alerted about new titles on your ebrary site that match certain criteria? Or about a particular title ebrary will offer for perpetual access in the future? Simply follow the steps below to create the corresponding search.

To create a saved search:

1. Go to your ebrary site and sign in to your personal ebrary account

2. Create and run a new search as follows:

a. Click on “Advanced” next to the Simple Search window

b. Set up your desired search criteria

Admins note, to search for new purchasable content, add a search line and set “Collection” to “All Purchasable”

c. Click “Search” (you need to do this for the search to be save-able)

3. Find and save your search as follows:

a. Under the Search tab, then under the SEARCHES tab, look for the search you just ran and click “Save” for that search

b. This will bring up a new window in which you can set search name, email address, search frequency (setting frequency to 0 turns off alerts)

c. Click “Create”

To modify your saved search criteria or search frequency:

1. Go to your ebrary site and sign in to your personal ebrary account

2. Under the Search tab, then under the SEARCHES tab, look for your saved search

3. Click on “Edit” for that search

4. Here you can change search name, email address, search frequency (setting frequency to 0 turns off alerts)

a. If you make changes here, click “Update” (takes you back to SEARCHES tab)

5. Or, to change the search criteria, click on “Edit Search Criteria”

a. Make any desired changes to your search criteria

b. Click “Search” (you need to do this for the search to be save-able)

c. Click “Update Search”

To create a persistent URL to a particular page or chapter…

Overview of steps:

• Use the URL that points to the book
• Add the page number part manually at the end of the URL in the format: &page=xx
• To point to a particular chapter, use the first page number of the chapter
• Take care to use the “consecutive” page number used for ebook access versus the page number on the printed page

Here are the steps in more detail:

• When viewing a book in QuickView, the URL at the top is a bookmark to the document you are in, but that URL does not specify the page you’re on
• To specify a particular page within that document, modify the URL to include the page number:
  • Click at the end of the URL and add the following text: &page=xx (where xx is the page you are on)
  • Press the enter key
  • The screen will refresh, but it should leave you on the same page
  • Copy that full URL at the top for a persistent URL to the page
• Two ways to determine the ebook page number of a particular page:
  • In QuickView, at the top right, the number in the box is the printed page number; the first number in parentheses is the ebook page number – that’s the one to use
  • Or, start the process of printing the page you’re on and it will tell you the ebook page number
• Test by pasting the modified URL in your browser, and making sure it takes you to the page you want

Single User (SUPO) documents: identify, release, queue, time-out

You can identify whether an ebrary document is single user or multi user by opening it in QuickView.  If the “Release this title” button appears, it is a single-user-only document.
If multi user, that button doesn’t appear.

When you’re done viewing a single-user document, click the “Release this title” button so other users can access it right away.

If you have the document open, it is considered “in use” until it has experienced 15 minutes of inactivity.  Inactivity means no page turns, prints, copies, etc.  After 15 minutes of inactivity, access to the book will be taken away from you if someone else tries to open it, or if someone else is already in the queue for it.

Here is an overview of the queuing system for single-user documents:

• When a user (user-2) tries to open single-user documents that a first user (user-1) is actively using,  he/she will receive a message indicating that the book is being used.



• If user-2 chooses to queue for it, s/he is put in a queue and received the following message:
• User-1  is allowed to keep using the title as long as s/he is actively “using” it – that is, as long as he is turning pages, copying, printing, etc.  But once that book is idle for 15 minutes (for example, user-1 walks away from it for 15 minutes or he has logged out and 15 minutes have passed) access to that book is then taken away and given to the first person in the queue (user-2 in our scenario) who is notified as follows:
• User-2 has then 5 minutes to START using the book (for example, opening it) before he/she forfeits their space in the queue.  If user-2 misses the 5-minute window, the book is then back to the queue on a first-come first-served basis.

When I try to open a book, it says there’s a “minimum balance required”!

ebrary has one site that requires a deposit to view content: our “Discover” site, also known as “shop”.  Most likely, you accidentally got bumped to this site.

This site is intended for people who want to use ebrary, but who aren’t associated with a school or company that provides ebrary.  Our “shop” site offers only a subset of the titles in our typical collections.

If you had meant to instead be on your school or company ebrary site, please double-check the URL and re-enter it.

I can’t view the whole book; it says I don’t have “full access rights”.

Somehow you’ve gotten to one of ebrary’s preview sites, perhaps one of these:

http://site.ebrary.com/lib/alltitles

http://site.ebrary.com/lib/librarytitles

Anyone can access these PREVIEW-ONLY sites, and they show the full range of titles offered by ebrary.  However, you can only see a page of two of the actual content of books on these sites.

If you had meant to instead be on your school or company ebrary site, please double-check the URL and re-enter it.  Sometimes if you try to use a link to a book your ebrary site doesn’t have, you’ll be bumped to a preview site.

Can I get the audio disk or DVD that came with the print version of the book?

Unfortunately, physical add-ons included with the print version of a book (media, disks, cd-roms, DVDs) are not available with eBook versions and so are not available on ebrary.

Persistent URLs

Almost all ebrary links are persistent/standalone/durable.  This means that a copied link, i.e.:

http://site.ebrary.com/lib/librarytitles/docDetail.action?docID=10403872

will always link to the same title.

The one exception is URLs that are generated by the “All Subjects” (otherwise known as “browse”) feature.

http://site.ebrary.com/lib/librarytitles/browse.action

The links for the subjects under the “browse” tree are dynamically generated. The subject tree is re-generated daily to reflect added or changed content. Therefore, the links are not designed to be used for permanent reference. If you wish to create a persistent subject link, use the advanced search feature, where you can narrow your search by using Dewey or LC numbers.

Universal URL

ebrary URL’s attempt to redirect the user to the ebrary site that their browser cookie info suggests they should be using.

Depending on what’s stored in your ebrary browser cookie, you may sometimes see a message asking you to select your institution. You will only need to do this once. To check what’s stored in your ebrary browser cookie, you can visit http://site.ebrary.com/validate and check the part that reads “recent_channels”. If you are experiencing an issue with the ebrary Universal URL system, you can try clearing your browser cookies.

The use case of this feature is illustrated in the following example

ebrary URLs are in the format of http://site.ebrary.com/lib/XXXXXX

where XXXXXX is the institution.

For users who only visit one ebrary site, behavior is unaffected.  All users from UNIVERSITY A when accessing will be passed through automatically and a cookie will record them as having access to UNIVERSITY A.  Here is where the feature comes into play.  ebrary URLs are in catalogs all over the internet and our links are indexed in numerous places.

For example, lets say a student from UNIVERSITY A is browsing the web and comes across the following URL on UNIVERSITY B’s catalog.

http://site.ebrary.com/lib/universityb/docDetail.action?docID=1234567

While the user will not have access to UNIVERSITY B’s ebrary site, the system will check the ebrary sites that the user has had access to and then check to see if the document is available there.  So if the student were to click on the above link, the new URL redirect system should recognize that the students has access to UNIVERSITY A’s ebrary site and that the document is available there and automatically redirect correctly.  Before, the student would have simply gotten an unauthorized access message from the UNIVERSITY B ebrary site.

Can I submit suggestions or requests for content to be added to ebrary?

You are welcome to suggest any titles that we do not have in our collections. However, please be advised that ebrary cannot guarantee that your suggestion will be added to the database. We must first obtain a relationship with a publisher and that publisher has to grant us special copyright permissions to put the content in an online format, which takes time, and some publishers may not be interested in publishing content online.  You can email us at support@ebrary.com.

I was trying to view a document on my bookshelf and I received the error message “Document Unavailable”

There is garbled text in the document. What should I do?

Occasionally, a document’s cache becomes corrupted and some text might display as garbled. Please send an email to support@ebrary.com to report such an issue, please include the document ID and title. In the meantime you can view the garbled text by changing the page magnification.