When the COVID-19 pandemic hit in March 2020, the Brock University Library had to quickly pivot in order to continue to give the Brock community access to the resources they needed.

With the physical collection inaccessible, the Library activated an Emergency Temporary Access Service (ETAS) through HathiTrust, a digital service Brock is a member of. Launched in July 2020, it provided access to about 30 per cent of Brock’s collection through digital lending, where one student, faculty member or staff at a time could ‘borrow’ a digital copy of a book which matched a physical copy existing on the library shelves.

Through the 13 months the emergency service has been operating, more than 6,600 digitized books were accessed by the Brock community.

With the full Brock collection now once again being accessible as the campus opens, the University Library is winding down its emergency access service as of Aug. 27, which must be done for copyright reasons.

However, to accommodate the growing interest in remote access to the collections, the Brock Library offers both a scan and deliver service, as well as an ebook request form.

In the scan and deliver program, students, faculty and staff can access book chapters and journal articles from print-only sources by requesting a scan (subject to copyright fair dealing guidelines) to be delivered at no charge via email. For more information, or to request the service, visit the Request a Scan webpage.

The library has also been expanding its offering of ebooks, with more than 478,000 titles now in its electronic collection. After checking the Omni search tool to see if the library owns a particular item, the Brock community can suggest materials for purchase by the Library through the new acquisitions request form.

For more information about the collections and services available through the Brock University Library, visit Brocku.ca/library