Elsevier Launches the Legacy Collection of eBooks on ScienceDirect

Elsevier, a world-leading provider of scientific, technical, and medical information products and services, today announces digitizing its Legacy Collection in seven disciplines, expanding its content on ScienceDirect. With the addition of the Legacy Collection to ScienceDirect, highly relevant, scientific books from the mid-20th century to the present will be accessible online as early as December 2012.

“Modern scientific research builds upon what was discovered before,” said Suzanne BeDell, Managing Director, Science and Technology Books at Elsevier. “Researchers, faculty, and librarians alike will be able to efficiently access valuable foundational book content that appears in data searches in a digital format.”

Librarians at academic, corporate, and government research institutions now have the option to rapidly expand their book collections and researchers can access additional context for existing material, complementing current content across a rich range of sources. Usage patterns for existing deep backlist books on ScienceDirect provide ample evidence that researchers continue to use books published before 2000 in their work.

George A. Olah, 1994 Chemistry Nobel Laureate, Founding Director of the USC Loker Hydrocarbon Research Institute and contributor to the Legacy Collection remarked, “One book, Chemistry of Energetic Materials, includes contributions from three Nobel Laureates and seven members of the National Academy of Science, It speaks for itself that this is a very active field of fundamental science with far reaching practical importance.”

The Legacy Collection content on ScienceDirect provides additional scientific strength in the following subject-based collections:

Agricultural and Biological Sciences
Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology
Chemical Engineering
Chemistry
Engineering
Materials Science
Physics and Astronomy
Title-by-title lists can be found at the following site: http://www.info.sciverse.com/sciencedirect/books/legacy

The Legacy Collection marks a significant expansion of the eBook content available on ScienceDirect, which features more than 15,000 books and 2,500 journals along with more than 11 million articles, a content base that is growing at a rate of almost 0.5 million additions per year, with archives that reach as far back as 1823.