After months, perhaps even years of waiting, ebrary has finally launched a beta site at http://learningnetwork.ebrary.com/. The site is co-branded with The Learning Network, Inc., an Internet educational source and consists of approximately 300 business and economic titles. Unlike Questia, the collection is quite recent with more than half of the titles published in either 2001 or 2000. Routledge and Walden Publishing, Ltd. are heavily represented, but titles from MIT Press, Stanford University Press, Palgrave and The Rand Corporation, among others, can also be found.

The entire collection can be searched and viewed for free and without first setting up an account. An account must be created with a minimum $5 balance in order to copy or print any text, get a personalized activity report or receive notification of new features. Searching is limited to words in the text, subject, title, author and publisher with Boolean "and" and "or" options. The collection cannot be browsed nor can searches be limited by date. Additional search terms can be added by first clicking on the "More" box, which is rather cumbersome and necessitates scroll the frame up and down. The metadata displayed in the search results include picture of book cover (if available), title, author, subjects, date, publisher, Dewey number, ISBN and page number. The addition of the LC call number would be a useful addition to academic users.

The texts are in pdf format, enabling the original layout of the book to be retained. However, in most cases the book cover is missing. Although a generic image is used to represent the book cover in the search results, there is nothing to represent the front cover within the text itself. This can lead to some confusion when page one of a book is anything other than the title page. For instance, page 1 of Ron Chernow's Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. is blank. Page 2 consists of a list of other books by Chernow. Page 3 just reads "Titan", and page 4 is blank. It is not until page 5 that the title page appears. These pages led by the cover of a book make some logical sense; however, without a cover page, these pages will likely confuse the user.

As with Questia and netLibrary, ebrary's ebooks are accompanied by a suite of research tools, called InfoTools. These include a dictionary, encyclopedia, almanacs and proper name look-ups in biographies, phone, postal and email directories. A particularly unique feature is the ability to translate to and from French, German, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese using Alta Vista's Babel Fish. Translations of more than 10 words at a time, however, require a payment. Another nice feature is a geographic mapping feature which will map place names using either MapQuest (for US cities) or National Geographic's Map Machine.

The functionality of the dictionary, in my opinion, is a bit too robust. For instance, looking up "medieval" in the InfoPlease Dictionary returns over 100 entries, including the definition of chausses (medieval armor for the legs and feet) and black bile. Moreover, the entry for medieval is abbreviated, requiring the user to click on the "more" link in order to finally retrieve the actual definition of "medieval." I think the dictionary needs to be reformatted so that the dictionary entry for the request word is viewed in full from the onset, with the option of seeing related words.

The most frustrating feature of the site is the inability to move from a text back out to your original search results. Each time the search must be repeated, which can be quite time consuming. Overall, the functionality of ebrary's beta site is not very impressive. However, if ebrary is able to build a collection of ebooks that mirrors the currency of its beta site, then ebrary could certainly set itself apart from Questia's dated collection and the heavy price tag of netLibrary's collection. From a librarian's standpoint, I hope to see ebrary develop a library business model that would include institutional subscriptions, MARC records and allow for simultaneous users.