NetLibrary is a vendor that licenses book content from major publishers and converts the text to digital form. Vanderbilt library patrons share access to the netLibrary collection with patrons at over 500 Southeastern university, college, high school and local community libraries. Thirty-eight percent of netLibrary's titles were published between 1998 and 2000. The e-books in netLibrary are primarily academic, from prominent university publishers across the country, including Vanderbilt University Press, Oxford University Press, MIT Press and Harvard Business School Press. NetLibrary also has a collection of e-books whose text is in the public domain, including Hamlet, Beowulf, The Odyssey and The Canterbury Tales .
Users can then browse the collection, searching by author, title and keyword.
NetLibrary also offers the ability to search the text of all the volumes within the netLibrary's holdings, and will highlight the search terms within the text of the retrieved documents. The netLibrary system also provides links to the table of contents for all e-books. It is a particularly effective tool for searching persons, concepts and ideas over a broad range of literature, according to Haar. Downloading the titles allows users to view them through programs such as Acrobat Reader, giving them a more print-like appearance. Otherwise, one can view the books online through the netLibrary system, scrolling down the Web page to see more text.