As of Spring 2010, VIU has approximately 5,700 books in its collection which is located in the Commonwealth Hall Building. The library collection concentrates on materials specific to the academic disciplines within the curriculum - business and computer science - and to the English as a second language (ESL) program. All VIU students may use any material in the Library collection.

Organization of Materials in the Library

The materials in the Library are organized using the Dewey Decimal Classification System. The Dewey Decimal Code has ten main categories:

Some Dewey classes of particular interest to VIU students include:

e-Books

e.brary

VIU subscribes to e.brary's Academic Complete database, which is designed to meet the reference and research needs of students at the Master's level. It provides VIU students and faculty with access to more that 120,000 items, including e-books, maps, journal, and reports.
Academic Complete includes the full-texts of almost 35,000 current academic book titles.  Numbers of titles available in selected disciplines are shown below.

• Business and economics - 6,300
• Computers and IT - 2,800
• Education - 2,300
• Engineering & technology - 3,700
• History and political science (including a selection of historical maps) - 4,800
• Humanities, including music, theater, dance, film, media, art, and architecture - 1,600
• Interdisciplinary and area studies, including Asian, ethnic, Native American, gender, and gay and lesbian studies - 2,900
• Language, literature, and linguistics - 3,400
• Law, international relations, and public policy - 3,800
• Life Sciences, including biology and environmental studies - 2,000
• Medical - 1,300
• Nursing & Allied Health - 1,600
• Physical sciences - 1,400
• Psychology and social work - 2,000
• Religion, philosophy, and classics - 2,200
• Sociology and anthropology - 2,000

To search e.brary, please click here

Other Online Sources for Full-Text Books

In addition to e.brary, there are a number of free websites that provide access to thousands of full-text books. Typically, the books available on these sites are older ones that are out of copyright. However, seminal works in many fields and a large amount of classic literature are available. The sites include:

• Bartelby.com's Great Books Online Classics of fiction, nonfiction, verse, and reference online.
• Google Book Search Use to search for full-text of books available on the Internet.
• Internet Archive Internet Archive (IA) is a nonprofit organization dedicated to building and maintaining a free and openly accessible online digital library, including "snapshots of the World Wide Web" (archived copies of pages, taken at various points in time), software, movies, books, and audio recordings.
• Project Gutenberg The oldest digital library, it provides free access to over 30,000 online books searchable by author, title, and subject. You can also browse by author, title, most recently posted, or language.
• The Online Book Page The University of Pennsylvania's digital library contains about 35,000 e-texts searchable by author, title, and subject. Also includes partial archives for journals and magazines.