Overdue Ideas

During the Chairman’s report, he has covered the role of ‘working groups’ in the new organisation. These are intended to promote product development – in the way that the user community has in the past pushed for product development in specific areas (e.g. electronic resource management – which resulted in the Verde product, and search interface – which resulted in Primo)

We need to think about the areas where development is needed, and the Chair has suggested, almost as an aside, that ‘e-books’ could be such an area.

This is interesting, as e-books were discussed in the development of Verde, and in theory Verde can help manage e-book collections. I’m not sure though, how well it fulfils the need here, and when we were working with Ex Libris on Verde we did recognise that e-books were not really understood yet, and the requirements for managing them unknown.

I can’t decide if e-books are a big issue for (academic) libraries or not. For RHUL, the largest e-book collection we have is EEBO (Early English Books Online). However, we buy and manage this basically as a single item – pretty much like a database subscription.

With the Google books developments and the Open Content Alliance, there are increasingly large numbers of ‘free’ e-books online. I can’t really see a future in which individual libraries try to manage all of these titles. I suspect that we need to re-think our expectations of user behaviour for e-books. If libraries are to engage with these collections at a title level, I suspect that this is more likely to be via federated searching than by cataloguing – this is where products such as MetaLib and Primo start to be used.

written by ostephens