Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to speak with the locals when you’re on vacation? What about learning some useful sentences in Spanish, Italian or Russian?

Well, through our eBook and audiobook collection, you can have 24/7-hour access to hundreds of titles on foreign language study. In fact, the library currently has 419 titles on language study that are all accessible through OverDrive.

Parlez-vous français? Want to travel around the beautiful Province of Quebec but your knowledge of French is limited? Check out any one of the French languages study titles such as: “Beginning French for the Utterly Confused” or “Behind the Wheel Express – French 1”. Want to learn Mandarin? Have a look at: “Chinese for Dummies”. If you’ve been trying to forever get rid of your foreign accent that always makes you stand out in an English crowd you should read “Accent Reduction Made Easy” (maybe I should check out this book myself! After 27 years in Canada, people still detect my Spanish accent).

All you need to borrow materials from McGill OverDrive is your McGill ID barcode and PIN number. Once you log in, you can borrow e-audiobooks for a period of 7 to 14 days in MP3 and WMA format. For transfer to Apple devices iTunes is required as well. And the greatest thing about these books is that you don’t need to worry about getting water or sand on them or about returning them to the library on time. The e-audiobooks you borrow will be returned to the OverDrive collection automatically after a set number of days (between 7 to 14) so you have nothing to worry about while you are traveling!

So the next time you are at the beach in Cuba, or walking in some plaza in Madrid, think about the thrill of being able to ask the waiter: “una cerveza fria porfavor” (a cold beer, please) while secretly knowing that you just learned how to say that in Spanish a few minutes ago!

For more information about OverDrive go to: http://www.mcgill.ca/library/library-findinfo/ebooks/borrowing-eaudiobooks/

Have a wonderful summer!

http://www.flickr.com/photos/pitmanra/4486630439/

Well actually, there really isn’t any question at all. In my humble opinion, the advantages of owning an electronic version of a book instead of a print copy far outweigh the disadvantages. In a perfect world, without budgetary restrictions, we would purchase a print version and an electronic version of every title we select for the library. We would also have a copy of every book ever published if we lived in that world! Since this isn’t the case, librarians are frequently faced with the decision of which format to buy. Sometimes there is no choice because no electronic version is available, however, increasingly an electronic version is available for purchase.

Based on my experience helping folks at our service desk, some people prefer reading in print, while for others, if it’s not online it’s as if it doesn’t exist. Although, I have noticed that when the print copy isn’t available people are generally very happy to have access to an electronic version. Often, especially during paper time, scholars just need to access a chapter, a section of a book, or to verify the pagination for a citation, all of which can be done remotely from home, which is particularly great in the middle of winter! For the record, I prefer reading books in print, especially fiction, however, I have read many eBooks on my Kobo and iPad and have become accustomed to this as well.

There are a variety of technical factors that can limit access to eBooks. Sometimes these issues can discourage people from trying to access or download eBooks after a negative first experience. Many of these access issues are related to digital rights management (DRM). Even our DRM protected eBooks are generally easy to access and download, once you follow the instructions and figure out how they work. After that, they are really quite simple to use. Many of our eBooks have no DRM, and allow for unlimited viewing and downloading, which is like having as many copies as you need for your clientele at any given time. As far as I’m concerned, it’s really this last point that gives eBooks the edge over print. Also, the majority of our students now own mobile technology, such as an eBook reader or tablet, which allows them to take advantage of our incredible and ever expanding eBook collection.

Regardless of how you feel about eBooks versus print books, both formats will be essential parts of the collection in the Humanities and Social Sciences Library for the foreseeable future.

Let us know what you think. Do you prefer reading eBooks or Print? What do you think are the advantages and disadvantages of both formats?

I was looking at some of the titles received in the Collection Services area and noticed a volume that brought to mind the story of Grenfell and Hunt.

In 1896, supported by the Egypt Exploration Fund, these two British classicists journeyed to Egypt in search of papyri. One hundred miles south of Cairo, around the village of el-Behnasa they noticed curiously-shaped sand mounds that did not look like natural formations. After some digging they realized they were in the village’s garbage dumps. But in this rubbish, over a period of five years, they gradually unearthed 500,000 papyrus rolls and fragments, the world’s largest cache of papyrus manuscripts.

At the end of the nineteenth century, when Grenfell and Hunt were digging, El-Behnasa was a small wind-wept desert village, but it once was Oxyrhynchus, a prosperous Greco-Roman city.  It was ruled by the Romans, but the written and spoken language was Greek. Oxyrhynchus (“sharp-nosed”) was named for a species of Nile fish that in Egyptian mythology devoured the genitals of Osiris, Lord of the Dead.  The papyri written in Arabic, Coptic, and Latin; but mostly in Greek. They packed the papyri in conveniently-shaped Huntley and Palmer biscuit tins (700 of them) and placed the tins in wooden crates. The crates were taken by camel to the port of Alexandria and then shipped to Oxford. The papyri then had to be carefully cleaned, related fragments pieced or matched together, and then deciphered. It is taking decades.  Among the finds:  an almost complete text of Euclid’s Elements, school exercise books, private and official letters, fragments of works by Sophocles, Menander, Sappho, a biography of Euripides, religious texts including parts of the Gospels, and thousands of legal documents.

The discoveries are described and reported in The Oxyrhynchus papyri, published by the Egypt Exploration Fund.  Images of the fragment(s) are presented on one page with translation(s) and annotations provided on the opposite. The first volume was published in 1896; I was looking at volume 78 that had just been received in Collections. The Library has every volume published since 1896.

Arthur Surridge Hunt, disheartened and depressed, following  the death of his only son from complications following minor surgery, died shortly thereafter in 1936.

Bernard Pyne Grenfell had suffered several nervous breakdowns before he was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. He was admitted to the Murray Royal Institution for the Insane in Perth, Scotland  and died there in 1926.

Genfell, Hunt and their successors submitted detailed reports about the archeological process in Reports to the Egypt Exploration Fund. The Library has many of those Reports.

The earliest images or representations of el-Behnasa  are the  etchings and drawings of  Vivant Denon, an artist who accompanied Napoleon on his “expedition” to Egypt.

Denon’s works are in Rare Books and Special Collections.

Hugh MacLennan’s doctoral dissertation at Princeton was on Oxyrhynchus

Phoebe Apperson Hearst, convert and promoter of the Bahai faith and mother of William Randolph, was a benefactress supporting Grenfell and Hunt’s travels and excavations to Egypt, through the Egypt Exploration Fund…..but that’s another story.

Regards, from my office “in the quiet and still air of delightful studies”