The UTM Library, and the U of T Library system more broadly, has a massive collection of both print and e-books you can access for your research; learning how to navigate the catalogue and how to find print books and access e-books will save you time in accessing the information you need.
While many titles are available in both formats, there will be times when a particular book may only be available in print. Some e-books will have multiple links to access on different platforms, and some platforms are more user friendly than others.
Use the resources below to learn how to locate a print book in the UTM Library, how to distinguish print from e-books in the UTM Library catalogue, as well as how to access and download e-books.
Although your preference may to be use e-books for convenience, there will be cases where a particular books is only available in print. If you're not used to tracking down print books in a library, it can be confusing to find a specific one you are looking for. Use the UTM Library's to finding a print book in our stacks for help getting started. If you still have issues, you can always ask for help at the Information and Loans Desk, or the Reference and Research Help Desk.
An advantage to using print books is that because of the way they are organized in our stacks, you will often find related books on your topic that may not have come up in your search online, but that might still be useful to you. This is a strategy called shelf browsing. The LibrarySearch online system has a feature that lets you do this when you pull up the record for a print book, so you can do this both online and in-person at the Library. Check out this page for where to find the Shelf Browsing feature on LibrarySearch:
The LibrarySearch system will retrieve a wide variety of resources available at U of T when you run a search and, because there will often be more than one record for the same book, it's not always clear what is an e-book, or how to actually access that e-book when you do find it. This video will walk you through how to find e-books, confirm they are indeed e-books, filter to only see e-books, and how to access them from different publishers.
There will be times when you will come across books that are very relevant to your topic, but may only be available in print at other U of T Libraries. In these cases, you can request them to be delivered to UTM through the Intercampus Delivery service, rather than having to take a trip to another campus.
This video explains how to request a book from the Library catalogue: