If you discover a book that is not available in the Library, and would be useful for your assignment, dissertation or research, ask the Library to purchase it. We rely on our students and staff to help build up diverse and relevant collections across the social sciences, so please put the details of the book on the book suggestion form - https://library.essex.ac.uk/resreq/purchase 

The majority of books are now available in ebook format and can usually be acquired quite quickly

After looking at reference material you might want to learn about a topic in a bit more depth, and books are a good starting point, as they are usually more suitable than journal articles for establishing an understanding of a topic.

Academic books come in various flavours and include:
1. Introductory textbooks
These are often referred to on your reading lists and you can find a great selection in the Student Collection on Floor 1, as well as online

2. Short books
These have become popular in recent years, as they are cheaper & faster to publish, often deal with contemporary topics that are appealing to students, and are quicker to read! The Library has purchased all of the Oxford Very Short Introductions series, which cover all subject areas, but there are many other examples available in print or online.

3. Handbooks
These can be highly useful, as they summarise research across a broad subject area and its subfields. A very useful resource are the Oxford Handbooks in Linguistics that the Library has purchased access to. You can cross-search them for the topic you are interested in. Many others are available from publishers including Routledge, SAGE, Wiley, Springer Palgrave, etc., just use "handbook" as a keyword in library search (plus a few general keywords for your topic)

4. Monographs and Edited Collections
Monographs are just scholarly books written by an academics, and are useful if you need to pursue a topic in more depth. Good examples of these can be found through the library search & browsing the shelves, and the library subscribes to the Oxford Scholarship Online collection of ebooks in Linguistics. John Benjamins is a major publisher in Linguistics, and Translation & Interpreting, and we have full access to John Benjamins Ebooks in all subject areas from June 2021 to May 2022 under an Evidence-Based Acquisition programme (after May 2022 we will retain perpetual access to the most heavily used titles). To access the PDF of ebooks use "institutional login" and select "University of Essex" from the list of institutions. It is worth searching these ebook collections separately if you are doing detailed research on a topic. Also worth a look is Language Science Press a leading publisher of open access ebooks in linguistics

Edited collections have chapters written by different authors that relate to the title or theme of the book as a whole, and you might find that selected chapters from edited books are relevant to your topic.
 

The library search does include the contents (i.e. chapter details) of some books, but not all. Google Books or Amazon Book Search can be helpful in finding out the contents details of specific books.

Browsing the library shelves is a really good way of doing this too, as books on similar topics are shelved together. Linguistics books are shelved on floor 5, with reading list books on floor 1 (Student Collection). A summary of the classification for Linguistics is given below: