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Help for Online/Off-Campus Students: Books/Ebooks

Books and Ebooks

Our library has over two million print books. We also have many, many ebooks.

PRINT BOOKS

Use HuskieSearch to find print books.  (For help using HuskieSearch, see the Using HuskieSearch to Find Source page). You also have access as an NIU community member to print books in academic libraries throughout the state available through an interlibrary loan system called I-SHARE. NOTE: At this time, statewide borrowing and delivery of physical items have been suspended.

Once you find the print book you would like, you need to locate it on the shelf using its address or call number. To read a call number, see this Reading Call Numbers tutorial.

EBOOKS

Sometimes you will find ebooks in HuskieSearch. If so, click on the link that takes you to the book. You may need to enter your zid and password. You cannot access ebooks from any I-Share libraries outside of NIU. 

Books

HuskieSearch Find books in the Northern Illinois University Libraries, or search the holdings of 76 libraries throughout the state.

WorldCat Find books in world's largest online catalog, searching libraries around the world. Off campus users will need to authenticate before using World Cat.

Statewide Illinois Library Catalog (SILC) Use the Statewide Illinois Library Catalog to find books at public libraries and library systems throughout the state.

Center for Research Libraries (CRL) Online Catalog provides a search interface to the CRL makes "vast collections of newspapers, microform, journals, dissertations and other materials". Materials are "available via interlibrary loan, through electronic document delivery or in its reading room". The University Libraries is a member.

Hathi Trust is a digital repository for the nation's great research libraries, bringing together the immense collections of partner institutions. Conceived as a collaboration of the thirteen universities of the Committee on Institutional Cooperation and the University of California system, HathiTrust established a repository for these universities to archive and share their digitized collections, making their collections available, to everyone, anywhere, any time.

FINDING BOOKS USING CALL NUMBERS

E-Books

ACLS Humanities E-Book Provides full-text and full-page-image access to titles in most humanities disciplines and in area studies. The books included have been recommended by scholars as significant contributions to their respective fields. Offered by the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) in collaboration with ten learned societies and nearly 80 contributing publishers.

Ebook Central includes more than 70,000 individual texts covering a broad array of academic disciplines. The database boasts a distinguished set of publishers including such university presses as Oxford, Cambridge, Princeton, Harvard, etc. The content of the database is well paired with an advanced set of tools that allows for expansive searching capabilities, and manipulation and storage of text.

eBook Collection offers access to digitized books, including all of the titles produced by the Gutenberg Project. In addition, the University Libraries offers full-text access to some 1,500 titles in business, computer science, and general reference.