NetLibrary arrives at university

It was bound to come soon in this digital age, and it has: You can now search the full texts of certain books and check them out at UW–Madison, all by the seat of your pants.

It’s another way you can become – if you’ve been holding back out of a silly concern about physical fitness – a computer chair potato. You can virtually retrieve and search any of about 6,000 titles, instead of walking to a campus library.

The electronic book collection comes primarily from two sources. One is a 4,000-volume collection of books that have passed into the public domain, such as the works of Aristotle, Edgar Allan Poe and Charles Dickens.

The other offers 2,000 volumes in several disciplines purchased from a digital publisher called netLibrary, through an agreement among UW System libraries and other academic libraries in Wisconsin. The purchase was made possible by increased funding from the state Legislature for system library collections.

Users won’t generally check out an electronic book and plod page-by-page through the whole volume. “This is more of a souped-up reference tool,” says Susan Barribeau, GLS Web site manager and reference librarian. “You can search across titles for a key word, concept or person.”

Most of the 2,000 purchased titles are incorporated into the MadCat catalog, but you can also do a direct search through the netLibrary site.