Torrossa® Digital Library

Give your patrons access to an ever-increasing catalogue of important HSS scholarly content from across Europe and beyond. Brochure

Digital Library for Institutions

access.torrossa.com Direct access to your library's collections of Torrossa e-books and e-journals. Find out more about the content available and how to acquire it below.

Digital content

The Torrossa Digital Library includes content from a vast - and growing - number of scholarly publishers.
Originally developed to support publishers from Italy and the Vatican City, Spain and Portugal in digital publishing, our digital library has evolved and expanded greatly over the last two decades, still placing great importance in the digital diffusion of original language HSS research in the Romance languages, while also considerably widening its scope. Our collaboration with Erasmus Boekhandel, which began in 2020, has enabled the inclusion of a vast range of scholarly content in English, French and other languages, from across Europe and beyond. Our partners in the digital library are important academic publishers, international publishing groups, university presses, research associations, as well as highly specialised but lesser-known publishers.
An average of 18,000 items are currently added to Torrossa each month, including articles, chapters, e-books, current e-journals and journal archives, many of which cannot be found elsewhere. These are all high quality academic publications; one third of all journals are certified by the Italian National Agency for the Evaluation of the University and Research Systems (ANVUR).
The Torrossa catalogue focuses primarily on the Humanities and Social Sciences, with subjects ranging from Poetry to Architecture, Sociology to Economics, Linguistics to Law, Archaeology to Politics and Music to Psychology. All content proposed is selected by our Approval specialists for its quality and relevance to academic libraries.
The EIO (Editoria Italiana Online) and EEO (Edición Española Online) digital collections include the titles most representative of scholarly publishing in the respective countries.

Acquisitions

Torrossa Collections
A number of collections are available, all hand-selected by our experienced Approval specialists for their quality and relevance to academic libraries. These collections are compiled by publisher, subject area and language, as well as by interdisciplinary areas. Our careful selection process ensures quality collections of scholarly value, including titles produced both by well known publishing houses and by highly specialised but lesser-known publishers.
Continuous updates are made to collections as relevant new content is made available and subscribers are notified of additions to the catalogues at regular intervals during the year. New contributors are also added to the collection on a regular basis, as our dedicated publisher relations team works to bring on board an increasing number and range of publishers.
Pick & Choose
Our selectors are happy to compile custom collections on request, according to your institution's interests and budget.
Single titles
Personalise your catalogue even further by selecting and purchasing single titles directly from our website, using exactly the same online ordering tools and workflows as for print titles.
Discover what's on offer through regular New Title Information updates, tailored to reflect your interests and fully integrated with our online bibliographic database and ordering tools.
Approval plan
Let us take care of selecting material relevant to your interests as it becomes available.
Patron Driven Acquisitions (PDA)
Choose to make available to your patrons the metadata for a wider range of publications and add the titles that they request. PDA plans may be filtered by library staff members before orders are confirmed or publications added automatically to your collections following access by users.

Access

The Torrossa digital library is especially tailored for establishment-wide purchase and access by libraries, institutions of education and cultural, learned and professional organizations.
Torrossa provides unified access to all content by IP address recognition for your institution's network; distance access by proxy server and federated access with Shibboleth are also supported by the website.
An unlimited number of simultaneous users may access the content at any one time. The digital library can be consulted on PC, tablet or smartphone and is compatible with the most common browsers. PDF files may be viewed using Adobe Reader XI or subsequent versions.
Persistent identifiers such as permalinks and DOI are attributed to all the types of resources present on the platform to ensure that content can always be reached. OpenURLs can also be activated.
We collaborate with the leading federated search engines, Discovery Services and link resolvers. Content is preserved using long-term archives such as CLOCKSS and Portico.

Licensing

A single licence is applied to the entire range of content from all publishers collaborating in our collections, simplifying acquisitions and administration.
For our pre-compiled collections, all available archives and back-files are included in the initial purchase price, with the new content added each year covered by an annual subscription fee. A number of customized and flexible purchasing models are also available, including:
  • Filtered or unfiltered PDA plan
  • Purchase after 3 years
  • 3 year lease
  • Annual access licence
  • Short term loan
Permanent access to all content purchased is guaranteed.

Integration

We offer a range of solutions to simplify and facilitate the integration of electronic resources with library catalogues.
We provide standard MARC21 bibliographic records for all e-books purchased and direct permalinks to all journal titles, that can be uploaded into your catalogue in order to make e-content more visible to library users. We also collaborate closely with major discovery services, federated search engines and link resolvers.
COUNTER compliant statistics make it easy for you to measure usage of the resources.

User experience

Searching
The digital library uses semantic search technology. In addition to browsing options (by LC or DDC classification, author, title and publisher), a number of additional features are available to help users refine results and find the best matches for their searches:
  • apply additional filters easily, using facets and breadcrumb navigation
  • sort results by relevance (default), author, title or publisher
  • view keyword in context and sample pages
  • consult tables of contents, title pages, colophons, abstracts and sample pages
  • navigate publications in their entirety or as chapters/articles
Consultation
Fully searchable PDF files make documents easy to read and use. Library users may copy and paste text as needed, print pages and even save a local copy.
User workspace
All users can log in to create a personal user workspace, giving them the possibility to name and save searches and come back to them later, as well as tagging and commenting on results of particular interest. It is also possible to create and save shared tags and annotations.
The workspace makes it quick and simple to save citations and bibliographies and export them using RefWorks, EndNote, Zotero or Mendeley, or in Word, Excel and PDF format.