Marshall Cavendish Delivers Digitally
February 12, 2008

Public and school library colleagues: have you taken a look yet at Marshall Cavendish Digital? If not, it may very well be worth a peek, especially if, A. you are seeking a reliable source of multimedia and reference sources geared towards school curricula, and B. you and your users are familiar with the excellent materials Marshall Cavendish has produced in print.

A couple especially notable things about this file: they offer 26 categories among their digital reference works, ranging from Animal and Plant Anatomy to Drugs and Society, Exploring Life Science, Open for Debate, Renaissance and Reformation, to World War II and more. The file can be browsed by one of the 26 titles, or by a category (Sciences, Animals and Plants, Biographies, Geography, Health, World Cultures, or Social Studies), or searched - using either a Quick or Advanced Search (and Advanced Search here makes it easy to find the maps, photos, time lines, etc. that student researchers always crave).

What is equally notable, in addition to the content and easy search system, is the way their digital library is priced: it's one fixed price. No annual fee or subscription, no limits on the number of concurrent users, and remote access is included in the fixed price. And your library gets to choose which among those 26 (and counting) digital titles you buy - so you can tailor content to your student researchers' needs.

Get an institutional free trial, or take a guided tour at the main company web site (lower left of the screen). If you're serving K-12 researchers, or have recently had the question, "I'm doing a report on X*, can you help me?" at your reference desk, you will want to see this.

More as it happens,
Cheryl

* for X, read, "something in the sciences or the increasingly transdisciplinary social sciences and humanities"

Cheryl Laguardia, February 12, 2008