Resources for Libraries During the COVID-19 Crisis
Project MUSE is committed to serving our library customers throughout the global COVID-19 public health crisis. We do not anticipate any interruption in service and remain available to assist you while working remotely. For fastest response, please contact us by email with any questions or needs.
We have gathered some resources that we hope will help libraries with some of the challenges they may be facing at this time, including assisting their users with discovery of and access to reliable scholarly content from wherever they may currently be teaching and researching. We welcome suggestions for other information or tools that we can provide to make your work easier.
Temporarily Free Content on MUSE - Now Ended 
Project MUSE is grateful to over 80 of its participating publishers for temporarily freeing content to help ease the quick transition to remote work that libraries and researchers experienced at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. We were very happy to be able to provide the over 300 journals and close to 25,000 books for free to anyone visiting Project MUSE for a period of three months.
Providing free access to content on Project MUSE is done at the discretion of individual publishers. The free period for this content on MUSE has now come to a close. For libraries with institutional holdings on MUSE, please make use of our several options for easy remote access to help users who are working away from your institution. We also invite you to explore our Open Access content.
Discovery Tools
We created collections and associated metadata files for the temporarily free content, and shared this information with the major discovery system knowledge bases. We have now informed our vendor partners that the period of free content has concluded, and MARC record delete sets are available below to assist libraries with updating their catalogs to reflect the end of the free access.
Free Books - Delete Records
Download MARC Records Delete Set for Books (.mrc format)
These are the collection names in major knowledge bases, should you need to disable them.
- OCLC: Project Muse Free Covid Journals (Collection ID: Muse.covidjournals)
- Ex Libris SFX target: PROJECT_MUSE_FREE_JOURNALS_DURING_COVID-19
- Ex Libris Alma/360 Collection Name: Project MUSE Free Journals During COVID-19
Free Journals - Delete Records
Download MARC Records Delete Set for Journals (.mrc format)
These are the collection names in major knowledge bases, should you need to disable them.
- OCLC: Project Muse Free Covid Journals (Collection ID: Muse.covidjournals)
- Ex Libris SFX target: PROJECT_MUSE_FREE_JOURNALS_DURING_COVID-19
- Ex Libris Alma/360 Collection Name: Project MUSE Free Journals During COVID-19
Open Access Content on MUSE 
Project MUSE hosts over 2000 open access books and a small number of fully open access journals, all from distinguished not-for-profit scholarly publishers. These books and journals are permanently, freely available to libraries and users around the world. OA content on MUSE will appear in search results and browsing along with content owned by libraries, and like all content on MUSE is DRM-free with unlimited downloading and printing.
Browse all Open Access content on MUSE
Discovery Tools for Free Content
To increase discoverability of MUSE OA content, we make available free MARC and KBART files, and we have also worked with major knowledge bases to ensure libraries can easily activate our full collection of OA titles via their discovery services.
Open Access Books
Download MARC records (mrc format)
Download KBART files (txt format)
Download title list (xlsx format)
Open Access Journal Content
Download MARC records (mrc format)
Download KBART files (txt format)
Remote Access to MUSE Content
Project MUSE supports remote access to content via established methods including Shibboleth, proxy, and referring URL. Library customers are encouraged to use the tools in the Update Authentication Options section of our Library Dashboard to ensure that we have the most current details on the access options you employ for your institution. The dashboard requires creating a library user account. More assistance with remote access is available from MUSE Customer Support.
Temporary Access Using Personal MyMUSE Accounts
Any user may set up a personal MyMUSE account, regardless of whether they are affiliated with an institution that holds MUSE content. To help users more easily connect with MUSE content to which they are entitled via an affiliated institution's holdings, we have temporarily enabled MyMUSE personal account holders to link those accounts to their institution and gain access to entitled content.
Users are not required to supply an email address to create a MyMUSE account, but may voluntarily do so to take advantage of certain features. If a user’s voluntarily-supplied email can be matched to a known institutional customer domain, MUSE will allow users to temporarily activate remote access to their institution’s content simply by signing in to their MyMUSE account. The MyMUSE account access will be active through December 31, 2022.
Some institutions may have more than one email domain address for their users. Libraries may register additional domains, to help match more users to your institution, using the authentication options tool in the Library Dashboard. Library customers who do not wish for this temporary access option to be activated for their institution’s users may request to opt out of this feature.
MUSE Resources for Instructors
Project MUSE has launched a new section of our web site specifically to assist instructors with resources for teaching and research in an online environment. Libraries may wish to promote these resources to teaching faculty at their institution, or use the resources themselves when developing online instruction sessions or assisting faculty with locating appropriate, accessible course content. All content on MUSE is DRM-free, with unlimited simultaneous usage, downloading, and printing, making it ideal for class use.
Among the offerings for instructors are subject-specific lists of MUSE books and journal articles for use in classes or research projects, many of which are open access or temporarily available for free, or may be included in their library’s MUSE holdings. Also available are over 40 free articles and books about online teaching and learning, which may be helpful to faculty in adapting their courses to a remote environment. Instructors may also sign up to be alerted to new tools and information to help them with their work.
Search/Browse Tips and User Guides
Searching and Browsing on MUSE
Project MUSE’s search engine defaults to showing all of the content to which the searcher is entitled to full text access, if that user can be authenticated as affiliated with an institution that is a MUSE customer. The searcher will see all relevant results including book and journal content owned by their institution along with any permanently open access or temporarily free materials.
If a user is not authenticated, they may choose the “Only content I have access to” option from the access filters in the left panel of both the MUSE search and browse interfaces, which will limit their results to only OA and free materials. MUSE offers a Search Help guide with more tips.
Search MUSE Content
Browse MUSE Content
User Guides and Other Help
MUSE provides downloadable user guides and video tutorials for a variety of topics.
The answers to many common questions may be found in our FAQ.
MUSE News Email Sign-up
Sign up for our news and announcements so that you can stay updated on all the latest developments with Project MUSE, including any further initiatives related to helping libraries during the COVID-19 crisis.
