What types of books are included in Bloomsbury Collections?
To discover more about the content included on the platform, please visit the About Bloomsbury Collections section.
How often is Bloomsbury Collections updated?
Bloomsbury’s aim is to update the Bloomsbury Collections site with the newest releases at least once a month.
I am an author and my book appears on the site: how does Bloomsbury Collections affect me?
You should have received a communication from Bloomsbury regarding inclusion on the platform. If you did not, or you have any queries, please contact bloomsburycollections@bloomsbury.com.
Please let your librarian know your work is available on Bloomsbury Collections.
Are MARC records available for Bloomsbury Collections?
Yes: MARC records are provided at no additional cost, both for collections which your library has purchased, and for the freely accessible Bloomsbury Open Content. These are full RDA-compliant records in MARC21 format, and they include Library of Congress Subject Headings, book summaries, OCLC numbers, related ISBNs and DOI-based persistent URL links.
MARC Records are available here.
Can I see usage statistics for my institution?
Yes, usage statistics are available for the site. To find out more, please visit the Usage Statistics section of this site.
Functionality
What search and browse options are available?
There are multiple ways of navigating the content:
- The main Search box in the header
- Advanced Search: search by author name, title, category, or identifier
- Explore options: browse lists by subject or collection
How do I search for keywords?
Use the main site Search box to search the titles, chapter titles, abstracts, author names and full text of books on the site. Searches covers all of the XML content. The main Search box supports the following search methods:
- Stemming: a search for edit automatically finds grammatically-related terms like edits, edited and editing.
- Phrase search: quotation marks will limit your results to exact matches, e.g. "end of a century". If you don't use quotation marks, any phrase matches should still appear first in the results.
- Boolean operators: add AND, OR or NOT in upper case, e.g. Japan AND Brazil, Japan OR Brazil, Japan NOT Brazil. If you don't use Boolean operators, your search terms are automatically combined with a Boolean AND.
- Relevance ranking: author matches have the most weighting, followed by Title, Taxonomy terms, Summary/Abstract then Full Text.
- Predictive Search: suggests matches from Author, Title and Taxonomy fields in the Platform you are using.
- Synonyms: expands the user's search to cover UK/US spelling variants and any other synonymous terms which we specify (e.g. Myanmar / Burma). We use a synonyms XML file to specify the list of variants to be used.
- Advanced Search: this is only available to authenticated users, so the navigation bar link only appears after you log in.
Can I save items for reading later?
Yes! It's quick and easy for any authenticated user to set up a personal account to save books, chapters or other items to view later, organise saved items into folders, email and export citations, save searches and set up search alerts.
Follow the link in the header to 'Sign in to your personal account', or select 'Sign up now' and enter a few personal details (name, occupation, country, email address and password) to create a Personal Account.
Please note you can use the same Personal Account details to sign in on multiple Bloomsbury platforms, including Bloomsbury Popular Music, Drama Online, Churchill Archive and other forthcoming resources.
Why do some titles display as HTML text and some as page images?
Most of the more recently published titles have been converted from XML files, and so are available to be displayed as HTML full text. This is more convenient for online display, and allows features such as re-sizing of text, easy copying and pasting, re-flowing to fit different sized screens, and internal hyperlinks within the book (e.g. from note references to end notes, and from bibliographic references to the bibliography). Apart from the page layout, the HTML text is identical to the print version, and we have retained pagination information to allow citing page numbers when quoting from these books. Going forwards, the majority of texts added to Bloomsbury Collections will be in HTML format.
However, we have converted a large number of titles from Bloomsbury’s rich backlist which were not available as XML files. For these, we have converted the source PDF files to create a browseable series of page images with a searchable HTML full text layer.
Can I print and download full text?
Yes, the site content has no DRM (Digital Rights Management) protection, and so it can be printed or saved to personal computers. All use of the site content is subject to our Terms and Conditions: printing and saving should be for personal use, and standard copyright restrictions apply regarding unauthorised copying and distribution.
Can I view the original print page layout?
Where available, the chapter-level PDFs available when you download are all identical to the print edition, allowing you to see the original pagination and typesetting. However, where these print versions are not available, you are still able to download the XML version of the respective chapter.
How do I cite texts from Bloomsbury Collections?
From the content page, click on the 'cite' icon to view formatted citations in APA, MLA, Chicago and Harvard citation styles. You can also download a file in RIS format for importing into reference manager software. Please note that the original pagination has been preserved from the print editions.
How do I find books from a specific subject area?
Select the ‘Subject’ link in the Navigation Bar to view all Subjects cover and click on the Subjects on that page to view books within a broad subject area such as Theology or Literary Studies. From the search results page, you can also use the ‘Subject’ filter on the left-hand side to filter your results further. The contents of these filters change every time you do a new search, to reflect the contents of your results set.
Accessing the Site
Do I need to log in to access the site? Most institutions will set up their access via IP-authentication, which means that users are automatically 'logged in' when accessing through their institution. If you have been recognised as a user from a subscribing institution, this will be signalled by the 'Access provided by....' message in the site header. Some institutions require username and password access. If you are in doubt as to how to access the site, please contact your library.
Is there a limit on the number of users that can use the site at the same time?
No, access is available on an unlimited simultaneous user basis.
Does the site support access via Shibboleth?
Yes. If your institution uses authentication via Shibboleth, select this option from the Log In page.
Can I access Bloomsbury Collections on a mobile device?
Yes, the site is responsive, and fully optimised for displaying on a range of tablet and smartphone interfaces. The site has been tested using recent versions of the iPad, iPhone, and Android smartphones and tablets. No web-enabled devices are specifically excluded, and there is no separate mobile site: the site layout adapts automatically depending on the size of the screen.
What browsers are supported?
Most browsers are supported including Chrome, Safari, Firefox, Edge, Chrome Mobile, and Safari Mobile. Please note that Internet Explorer was retired by Microsoft as of June 2022 so we are no longer able to guarantee support for this browser. We will continue to monitor usage from different browsers and platforms and revise our list of actively supported browsers and devices accordingly.
Does Bloomsbury Collections conform to accessibility standards?
Bloomsbury Digital Resources is committed to ensuring equal access for all users of our resources, regardless of technology or ability. Like all our resources, we aim for compliance with Level AA of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines version 2.1 on Bloomsbury Collections.
For more information, view our accessibility statement.
