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Thursday, 17 May 2007

Academic vision: work of the UK JISC in promoting the developing e-book usage

Notes on a talk by Caren Milloy of JISC from the E-Books & E-Content 2007 held at University Central London, 8th May 2007

Two year project to explore the feasibility of acquisition of e-books by higher education & further education.

Findings of the initial study:
  • Within libraries there is an ignorance of what is an e-book
  • Low level of awareness of value & relevance
  • Libraries & publishers are unsure of each others needs
  • Too few e-book available
  • E-books aren't always up to date
  • Wrong books have been made available i.e. not textbooks
  • Current pricing models are not acceptable
JISC plans to:
  • Initiate & check the feasibility of creating a catalogue of e-books
  • Ensure & monitor standards compliance
  • Develop access & licensing models in line with how the books are used
  • Look to explore and harness technologies of the future
  • Explore new models with publishers and aggregators - create forums for discussion
  • Partner e-book industry with the library community to experiment with alternate business models
  • Develop flexible models of provision
  • Monitor the impact of repositories in conjunction with e-books
  • Raise awareness of plagiarism, and as part of the contract, publishers with be encouraged to submit content to be uploaded to Turitin software for detection purposes

The
National E-Book Observatory will be a study into the usage of e-books with the aims of proving demand to publishers and promote best practice in marketing and purchase models. It will provide H.E. & F.E. with a collection of e-books for a 2 year period but is restricted to the following subject areas: Business and Management studies, Engineering, Medicine (not mental health or nursing) and Media Studies.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Thanks for this summary Susan. I knew it was coming up but have not had time to look for any details.

I am not sure how we contact each other for the group assignment, and I have a new blog site that should be going on the 3cst2 site soon.

Anonymous said...

Hi Susan

Just to say I have taken the liberty of making a Knowledge worker's Wiki page for the group 2 assignment, just because it has a discussion forum and I thought it might be easier to keep track of conversations if they are all in one place. There is nothing in it except the name and we can change that.

My problem with the blog is that I can only respond to a post you have entered and so it is a bit limited in terms of preparing things, but any suggestions about the way to proceed REALLY welcome.

Hope you can see the page though!Could you let me know on my new blog page or on the discussion forum itself? Thanks
Sue