ebrary Support Center

What is a “personal ebrary account” and a “Bookshelf”?

To use certain ebrary features, you need to first sign in to your personal ebrary account.  These features include:

• Download a chapter or page range as a PDF
• Download an entire book using Adobe Digital Editions
• Save (to your Bookshelf) links to ebrary books
• Make (and save in your Bookshelf) notes in ebrary books
• Make (and save in your Bookshelf) highlights in ebrary books
• Create folders (in your Bookshelf) to organize your links to ebrary books
• Share or email folders (in your bookshelf) that contain links to ebrary books

Once you have a personal ebrary account, you will have your own personal ebrary Bookshelf as well.

Note, preferences info (e.g., citation choice and language preference) are stored as “cookies” on the computer itself – so they follow the computer, not your personal ebrary account.  But your Bookshelf and things specific to your username (e.g., password, name, and email address) follow your personal ebrary account login.

You can share or email books in your bookshelf

Saving a book to your bookshelf actually just saves a link to that book.  If you want to share that link, along with a summary of the notes and highlights you’ve made in the book, you just need to put that book in a folder in your bookshelf, then share or email the folder.

To share or email one or more books that are in your bookshelf:

1. Go to your ebrary site and sign in to your personal ebrary account as usual
2. Click the “Bookshelf” tab
3. Click the “Add folder” button to create a new folder
4. Drag and drop books from your bookshelf onto the folder
   (Click on the book’s cover and drag to the folder’s title)
5. Open the folder
6. Click the “Share this folder” or “email this folder” button
   (the buttons are to the right, above list of books)
   - To share, copy the link provided and send or post it
   - To email, enter the email address(es) to send to
7. Click “OK“

“Share this folder” versus “email this folder“:

• “Share this folder“:
  • Creates an active link to the folder in your bookshelf
  • If you change your notes or add books to the folder, those changes will be reflected to the user of the link
  • The link is specific to your ebrary site.  User’s from a different ebrary site can edit the URL to reflect their ebrary sitename, for example:
    • If you’re from Stanford the link you send would look like:

      http://site.ebrary.com/lib/stanford/viewFolder.action…

    • If the recipient is from Berkeley, they would change it to:

      http://site.ebrary.com/lib/berkeley/viewFolder.action…

• “email this folder“:
  • Sends a static copy of your bookshelf folder as it appears at the moment it is emailed
    • Changes you make to your folder will not be reflected to the recipient(s)
  • Sends generic links to the books so that if a recipient uses a different ebrary site, the links will attempt to open on their own ebrary site
    • Before clicking the emailed link, the recipient should go to their ebrary site and sign in as usual
    • If the recipient doesn’t open their ebrary site first and their browser doesn’t have a cookie stored indicating their usual ebrary site, the book will open on our preview-only site

Note: Your notes and highlights will only be visible to the recipients in list form in the folder view – not the way one’s own notes and highlights display. The “Notes” page and the highlights-shown-on-the-book’s-pages are reserved for one’s own notes and highlights.

To share or email a bookshelf folder to off-campus users accessing the ebrary site via a proxy

If you are trying to share or email a bookshelf folder to recipients who need to access the ebrary site via proxied links, there are a few options.

First here are a few details about how sharing and emailing bookshelf folders work:

• Sharing a bookshelf folder:
  • If the person who creates the shared-bookshelf-folder link has accessed their ebrary site via the proxy server, then the shared-bookshelf-folder link is proxied.
  • But if the person who creates the shared-bookshelf-folder link has NOT accessed the ebrary site via the proxy server (i.e., they are on campus), then the shared-bookshelf-link will NOT be proxied.
• Emailing a bookshelf folder:
  • When a person emails a bookshelf folder, the recipient does not get a link to the folder, they get links to each of the books in the folder. And those links are not site specific and they don’t contain any proxy info – regardless of how the person who shared the folder had accessed the ebrary site when they emailed the folder.  They look like this  http://site.ebrary.com/id/10542219

Given this info, the best option for sending a bookshelf folder to a user who will need to access the ebrary site via a proxy is to share the bookshelf.  Here are two alternative approaches:

1. Sender accesses the ebrary site via the proxy server when they are going to create a shared folder. That way the shared-bookshelf-folder link provided by the system will be proxied.
2. Sender does not access the ebrary site via the proxy server, but then pastes in the proxy info to the front of the generated shared-bookshelf-folder link. That is, the sender would simply paste the proxy prefix (e.g.,  http://ezproxy.sitexyz/login?url=)  at the front of the shared-bookshelf-folder link’s URL (taking care not to have any spaces or extras).

If someone has emailed you a bookshelf folder, and now you want to open one of the books even though you are off campus and need to access your ebrary site via your proxy server, you can do the following:

• Go to the emailed list of books and copy the docID of the book you want to access, that is:
  • Right-click on book’s link
  • Select “Copy link address”
  • Paste that link somewhere (some sort of word document)
  • Select just the docID at end of link
  • Copy that docID
• Go to your ebrary site in the usual way
• Open any book on the ebrary site
• In the URL at the top, replace the docID of that book with the one you just copied from the book in the email

For additional detail about sharing or emailing a bookshelf folder, see:
http://support.ebrary.com/kb/share-email-bookshelf

If your bookshelf contents seem to have suddenly gone missing

“All the links and annotations in my bookshelf are gone – what happened?”

Some authentication methods affect personal ebrary account logins – and therefore affect bookshelves.  If your ebrary site changes to or from one of the following authentication methods, your personal ebrary account and your bookshelf will change:

• Athens
• Shibboleth
• EZproxy Single Sign On (SSO)
• RPA

If you had links, notes, or highlights saved to your bookshelf, they won’t automatically be in your new bookshelf – but, we can copy them over for you.

To have your old bookshelf contents copied over to your new bookshelf, email support@ebrary.com and include the following information:

• Your old username
• Your new username
• The name of the institution whose ebrary site you use
• The URL you use to access your ebrary site

Bookshelf limits

There is no limit to the total number of books (i.e., links to books) you can save to your bookshelf.

However, only about 250 books can be at any one level.  If you have more than that at a single level, you may start to lose information from the last titles in the list.

The solution is to nest the books in your bookshelf into folders.  You could, for example, create subject folders or alphabet folders (e.g., folder “A-C” for all titles that begin with one of those letters).

In summary, it is important to put your books into folders so you’ve never got more than about 200 at any single level.