Introduction
The open access movement in science is growing and is also being driven by our Specialist Information Service. Many documents are available for download as PDF-files. But how do you work with them? Print them out? Read them in front of the PC at the desk?
In this tutorial, we will explain in 3 quick steps how to comfortably read, search and comment on many of our MENAdoc titles on your iPad1 – wherever you sit (or lie).
1. Find a Document
All downloadable PDF-files are suitable for this, but of course we want to explain it using our open access collection MENAdoc.
First look for an interesting title. This can be done via the collections (middle), the search (top right) or the lists/clouds (bottom left).
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- Find document on MENAdoc via search, collections, lists or clouds
As a result you should come to the title page of the document containing the “Bibliographic Metadata”. Our choice was: „Towards a cultural history of the Mamluk era …“, volume 118 of the Beiruter Texte und Studien.
2. Retrieve the Document
On this page, you will find the download of the PDF-file in the section “Links”. Tab the link of the PDF-file so that it loads in the browser.
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- PDF-document on the title page (Bibliographic Metadata) on MENAdoc
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- PDF document in the iOS web browser with the “share” button
(If there is not a link to a PDF-file in the “Bibliographic Metadata”, the selected title is unfortunately not suitable for iBooks. Due to legal reasons, we can not offer a download for some documents.)
3. Copy PDF into iBooks
In the bottom bar of the browser, select the “Share” menu, locate the iBooks icon and tap it.
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- PDF document in the iOS web browser with the “share” button
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- The “share” menu of the iOS web browser with “Copy to iBooks” button
Done!
When you open the iBooks app, you can find the PDF in your “bookshelf” and you can take it anywhere. There is a page overview, bookmarks and a full-text search.
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- The iBooks bookshelf with open access title from MENAdoc
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- The iBooks page overview
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- The full-text search of iBooks
1) Our open access titles should work similarly on Android devices. But Adroid has no standard program for e-books. Therefore we would have to write several tutorials or recommend one app. Maybe we’ll catch up in the future.