What are access restrictions?
All digital resources are still governed by copyright. The way that it is dealt with in digital resources is through how many copies are provided and limits placed on how you can use those copies.
Copies, licenses, or seats
eBooks and digital media mimics us having physical copies of books, journals, or media on the shelf. Since they are digital copies, there's no physical restriction to how many copies can exist. There are however limits to how many copies the library can acquire based on the publisher's limits or by the cost of each copy.
Access limits
These are placed on books to control how they're distributed. As you can access the book from anywhere this controls who can access/download the book and how you can use it. This is done through Digital Rights Management (DRM).
Both the copies and access limits are controlled by the publisher. Each publisher has a different limit to how many copies we can get, how many pages you can print, and how you can read the book.
To find out more about the concepts behind Licencing, DRM and Copyright see our guide on Copyright: Licencing and DRM.
To find out how to interact with an ebook see Reading and Downloading eBooks
User access restrictions
When it comes to 'picking up' a digital resource there are limitations in place for how many people can do this at a time.
DRM Free/Open Access
There is no restriction to how much of the item and how many people can access the content at one time.
Unlimited
There is no restriction to how many people can access the content. However there is still digital rights management on the content. You may be only permitted to print a certain allocation of pages out or are restricted to how you can transfer or read the digital book.
Limited or user restricted
Only a certain number of people can access the content at a time. This either is per item or across a whole service.
All licences and access differ between various different vendors or providers. Depending on what platform you are using the books you find on there might all have the same type of restriction (e.g. all DRM free access) or a combination of all three.
It is encouraged to identify how many copies of a book we might have before picking a particular method to read an ebook. Depending on how the book is restricted and what copyrights are placed on the book you may need to choose whether or not you read the book online or download a section to read offline.
It is recommended to use the chapter download option if a book has limited copies where available.
For DRM Free/Unlimited titles you can read online or full download the book without restricting anyone else from reading it.
Number of copies
To find out if there are any limitations on the number of copies there are look at the main resource page of the book. This will be the first page you see after clicking the View eBook button from our library catalogue (that is not the ECU log in page).
Here's an example of a book hosted on the ProQuest platform.
You will find the number of copies held written just below the title. Here we have a book with unlimited copies available: https://ecu.on.worldcat.org/oclc/500570955
How many copies we have may be noted elsewhere on the resource page.
Look around to see if you can find it. For example EBSCO has their access restrictions listed at the bottom of their record.
If there is no note on how many copies is available and we have not advised so in the Database Notes field in our catalogue then most likely it has unlimited user access.