These materials are not open - they are only available to people with a UMass Lowell login. You may be able to construct an entire course reading list from ebooks, chapters, and articles available through the UMass Lowell library. These materials will be free to your students, as long as they have an active UMass Lowell login.

Some book publishers maintain very tight control over how many people can use an ebook at once. Publishers may limit the number of users that can use an ebook at the same time - in other words, the number of simultaneous users.

Whenever possible, the library advocates for open, unlimited use. And, whenever possible, we purchase ebooks with unlimited simultanous users.

However! Please pay careful attention to the information on the landing page for each ebook. If there are limitations, such as only 1 user at a time, that information should be on the book's landing page. At UMass Lowell, only books with unlimited simultaneous users satisfy requirements for NOLO course designation.

About Library Ebooks

The UMass Lowell Library offers our students, staff, and faculty thousands of full text ebooks.

• Many are available for unlimited use by the campus community.
• Some are limited to 3 or 1 simultaneous users. Ebooks with those limits are not considered eligible to be no-cost course textbooks for OER course-marking purposes.

Start at the library website

https://www.uml.edu/library/

1. Choose the Catalog tab and enter the title, keywords or subject for the book you are looking for.

2. Filter the results in the left hand column of the results page. 

• Under Held by Library click "UMass Lowell Libraries".
• Under Format click "eBook"

3. To determine whether an ebook  permits unlimited users, click the blue "Access online" OR "View Ebook" button. This will take you to the ebook platform - we have more than one! - which should generally indicate how many users can see the book at one time.

• While useful for temporary access, please note that The Internet Archive is not guaranteed permanent access for a classroom textbook. 

About Library Articles

The UMass Lowell University Library subscribes to millions of articles on behalf of the campus community.

• The most reliable way to share an article with students is to use the permalink or stable link provided in each database.
• If you do not see a link to the full PDF, contact us to see if there is a technical issue, or if it's an article we don't have.

Start at the library website

https://www.uml.edu/library/

1. Choose the Article Quick Search tab and enter the title of the article you would like to assign, or keywords to find articles on a topic.

2. Once you find a suitable article, click on the title to find the article detailed record. If we have the PDF, you should see a PDF link to the upper left part of the screen.

3. Next select the permalink menu item on the lower right. Share that link on Blackboard or Canvas - and you're done! Do not use the browser bar link - that is typically only a temporary link.

When you are putting your course reading lists together using library materials, you will need to use these concepts.

• Simultaneous users: we try to purchase ebooks with unlimited users whenever possible. This means that any number of students can access the book at the same time. In some cases, we may buy ebooks with limited simultaneous users. This means that only 1 or 3 people can look at the book at a time. We may do this because either the publisher just doesn't offer an unlimited user version, or the unlimited user version is prohibitively expensive.
• Permalink: for many of the articles and books you will find in our online resources, the browser link (that you might copy from the address bar) is not a "permanent" link. It is a temporary link, which you may have encountered before on the internet. These are links you might bookmark but, when you use them later, give you the message that the "session has expired" or "link has expired". Almost all of our databases will have a button for a permalink, permanent link, or stable link. You want to send those to your students, not the address bar link.
• Proxy prefix: or login prefix or proxy server. This will usually be automatically included if you use library database permalinks. However, it can help to understand the process, in case your students need help. When you log into library resources from home, the online login process goes through what is called a proxy server. The proxy server makes your computer look as though it is coming from on-campus, so that the databases recognize you as a member of the UMass Lowell community. 
  • What does this look like? When you send your students a permalink, you should see this special prefix, highlighted here in red. 
    • JSTOR example: https://umasslowell.idm.oclc.org/login?url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/26386935
    • That links is a combination of the JSTOR "stable link": https://www.jstor.org/stable/26386935
    • Plus the special login proxy prefix https://umasslowell.idm.oclc.org/login?url=