Library and Information Services, Royal Conservatoire of Scotland

Monday 28 November 2016

Finding an E-book that's on your RCS Reading List

If you're a student at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, and you've been recommended an e-book, do you know how to find it?

1. Find the book

The reading lists are all on Moodle, so there should be links to the books.  However, we do have two kinds of e-book. It's really quite straightforward:-
  • E-Books we've bought singly, and catalogued like ordinary print books. There will be a link to the book, once you've found it in our catalogue.
  • E-books we've bought in "bundles" from the publisher.  So if a book is published as part of the  Oxford University Press bundle (for example), you might need to go to our website and click on the link for E-books, THEN on the link for Oxford University Press Scholarship Online.  Lastly, search for the book using their search facility.
2. Get access to the book

If you're on RCS premises, you may get straight in without needing to input your login details, depending on the publisher.  Some do require you to login anyway.

If you're offsite, you will definitely have to login.  

Remember, our institutional access is called Shibboleth (you might encounter that name) AND NOT Athens.  Don't click on any links marked Athens.  Once you've clicked on Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, you then use your normal login - the one you use to logon to our computers.

 3. If it all goes wrong ...

  • If you've accessed a book via our catalogue, then you should have no problem.  
  • If you've accessed a book via our e-book page and then via the publisher's website, then you have access to the book so long as it's actually in the bundle that they allow us to use.  (Sometimes, we're only allowed selected parts of their back catalogue, not every single book in it.)
  • If you've gone straight to the publisher's catalogue AND NOT via our catalogue or e-book pages, then you may miss the appropriate login prompts.  Try our catalogue and e-book pages and see if that works.  If you still have difficulty, please ask us!  The library contact details are on our website.


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