Information Privilege

The publishing world has not entirely caught up with the modern digital environment. You may be surprised to find out that a lot of books – especially older academic books – are not digitized by their publisher due to the cost of production and data storage. In addition, quite a lot of reading material - notably eBooks available for Amazon's Kindle device - cannot legally be purchased by academic libraries to loan out to students and faculty. For older books, libraries rely on non-profit entities to digitize titles when they are able to do so without violating U.S. Copyright laws.  

Because UMass Global is an online university, the library has the added limitation of lacking a physical collection. Without a print book collection, the library is unable to lend print books or participate in print sharing initiatives ("interlibrary loan" services) with other libraries.

When a title is not available for the UMass Global library to purchase legally in digitized format, there are a few other options:

• See if the book has been digitized by Google Books or by non-profit entities such as the Internet Archive or HathiTrust.
• Check your local library to see if they have the item you need or if they can get a print copy through their interlibrary loan services. See Accessing Scholarly Research and the WorldCat guide for more information about borrowing books from public and academic libraries.
• Look for inexpensive used copies to purchase on Amazon or other used booksellers on the Internet

Alternatively, you may be able to find other research material that is just as useful. You can meet with a member of the UMass Global Library staff to help you with your research. Simply use the library's appointment scheduler to pick a time that suits your schedule.