For many of you, the Oxford University Press Very Short Introductions series doesn’t need much of an introduction at all. You might already be familiar with the books published under the same name (or VSI for...short). The books are pocket-sized primers, providing short introductions to a range of subjects written by scholars noted in that field.

The Library has many of the books in our collection and they are frequently requested by readers and referred to by librarians for their ability to explain sometimes challenging topics or concepts to a general audience. But when you can’t get to the Library to read Very Short Introductions in print, the Library provides access to all of them, online, via the Very Short Introductions database. The database, accessible with an active NYPL library card, includes the full-text of every VSI title, but also allows for browsing of titles by subject or for keyword searching across all the titles at once. 

And there are many titles to read through. As of this writing, the database includes 630 books in subjects spanning the arts, humanities, social sciences, hard sciences, health & medicine and law. The three most recently published Introductions demonstrate the range, with books on Albert Camus, Forensic Science, and Marine Biology. The option to keyword search across all the titles allows readers to see the other books that cover their search query, providing a wider application of the term than one might find in a reading of a single title. 

The Very Short Introductions platform is a fantastic resource for students and lifelong learners, especially those looking for more in-depth content than one might find in a Wikipedia article. The Introductions, and by extension this online platform, occupy an important space in the information ecosystem: university press-published, scholar-written, overviews for a general audience. They might be very short, but they are also very useful and worth reading.