The Scholars Portal Books platform is designed to provide a single interface for accessing digital texts from multiple content providers. With a single-search, you can find newly published material from some of the world's more important scholarly publishers. You can follow citation links to explore different treatments of topics and you can explore historical dimensions of many topics by searching through an extensive collection of digitized books.
This collection of electronic books contains recent books from scholarly publishers that have been selected by your library to support the research and teaching mission of your university.
In addition to commercial ebooks, the system contains over 359,000 open access texts drawn from the collections of Ontario's 21 university libraries, which have been scanned and digitized for online reading and downloading by the Open Content Alliance in partnership with the Internet Archive. These texts are available both to members of the Ontario university community and to the public at large.
The project was made possible by support from the Government of Ontario through the OntarioBuys initiative and through the efforts of your library and the Ontario Council of University Libraries.
There are many search engines you can use to explore academic content on the Internet and there are many new resources available published as Open Access content. While OCUL supports these new publishing models, the reality is that most scholarly content is still available only through commercial channels. Search engines on the web can point you to this content, but your library makes it possible for you to access that content through subscriptions and licensing fees. With Scholars Portal, the Ontario university libraries have built a service that not only allows you to search these licensed resources, but that will house and archive that content so future generations of scholars will continue to be able to access the same content regardless of changes in the publishing world or changes in your local library's subscription policies.
Scholars Portal is a service available only to faculty and students at Ontario's 21 universities. Funded by your university library to house content licensed by your university library. Scholars Portal serves registered patrons of those libraries.
Scholars Portal was conceived as a collaboration of the university libraries of the Ontario Council of University Libraries. A committee drawn from the member libraries governs Scholars Portal. Scholars Portal services are housed and managed from facilities in Robarts Library at the University of Toronto.
Scholars Portal runs on a cluster of 6 Dell servers and uses Apache Lucene and Solr for indexing and searching. Our storage array contains over 20TB of full-text storage. Our search application is best viewed with newer browsers, including Firefox, Safari, Chrome and Internet Explorer 7 and 8. Older browsers will work but with some loss of functionality.