This session by Caroline ??? from Coutts

Coutts is the largest approval vendor in Canada and the UK, and they own the myilibrary platform – so as well as competing with other vendors like YBP, they also are competitors with ebrary and other e-book platforms.

Coutts part of the Ingram Book Group, which also has a number of other ‘digital’ arms – including print on demand, and digital asset management.

Caroline starting with a quote

“Most strategies are built on specific beliefs about the future. Unfrotunately the future is deeply unpredictable” – Michael E. Raynor, The Strategy paradox

Caroline noting we have moved from wondering e-books have a future, to how we work with them – no questions that they are here to stay.

Caroline saying that one of the most common questions she hears are “What are other libraries doing?” – she is saying that there are a number of answers:

• Some libraries doing nothing! Caroline says – this is not an option. Some material will only be available in ‘e-book’
• Some libraries taking a ‘wait and see’ – similar to doing nothing, but with active monitoring of situation. This may be wise, but there are costs:
• Patron dissatisfaction – they will know there are e-books out there, but you won’t be supplying them
• E-books can make researchers more efficient (study at University of Toronto – but no reference)
• Collaboration functionality possible with e-books
• Libraries investing in digitisation, and this is high cost – the longer you keep buying print, the longer you will be digitising, and you don’t necessarily get the same functionality – and you continue to have space management issues etc.
• Some libraries “Form a Committee”!
• This may be combined with other strategies
• Caroline thinks that joking aside this is a good idea – need discussion about the issues in your library – lots of stakeholders within your library and you need them involved
• Caroline noting that the e-book committees she has seen are full of younger librarians – which she is concerned suggests that we aren’t taking e-books as seriously as we need to – we need to involve senior/more experienced librarians in the discussions as well

Caroline saying:

• E-books are not just another binding – many differences
• Subscription based subject packgages
• Perpetual access publiher packages
• Individual titles
• Front list
• Back list
• Which areas  – Humanities, Sciences, Reference
• Single or multiple users

Caroline mentioning pros and cons of going straight to the publishers:

• Pros:
• no middle man
• aggregation with journal content
• packages usually significantly discounted in relation to print (but this may be part of a ‘deal’ which means you save on individual titles, but spend more with the publisher overall)
• Cons
• Numerous licenses
• Numerous invoices
• MARC records
• Title-by-Title
• Not all have platforms
• Multiple search silos (I have to say that I see this as a problem with book vendors as well, although possibly of a smaller scale – i.e. less silos)
• Limited collection development support

You can also purchase from a subscription agent – although Caroline doesn’t know of any library actually doing this. She runs very very quickly through some pros and cons, but hasn’t got much time, so skipped it mostly.

Finally, via an aggregator:

• Pros
• Single search silo for ebooks
• title by title selection
• packages
• patron driven
• …
• Cons
• didn’t get time for these

Also, can buy from a book vendor – they have a lot of experience with all the things Mike listed in his previous talk.

Caroline, not suprisingly, seemed to favour the options around an aggregator (i.e. myilibrary) and vendors (e.g. Coutts)

Overall Caroline’s talk was good, but at the end felt it was a pitch for business for Coutts. Don’t mind this, but felt she over-egged it a bit, and I didn’t need this to understand the point.

The third presentation in the series on e-books by Mike Walmsley from YBP Yankee Book Pedlar).

Mike starting by saying that as with print, with e-books, vendors don’t just sell the book to a library, but provide many associated services.

Mike mentioning a session (which I’m planning to go to) later in the conference about merging print and electronic workflows for serials – and saying that serials have a huge headstart on books with this. However, he feels we have a chance to tackle this problem right at the start with e-books (I don’t thing he is right, as I think this has already diverged a long way – but I think he is right in the sense that the sooner we tackle the issues, the better)

Mike saying that the current offerings in terms of e-books have limitations, and libraries have had to be creative finding appropriate workflows.

Mike see’s the mission at YBP to integrate print and e-book workflows. He says they want to enable libraries to ‘keep those long established workflows’ – I think we need to be careful here. The world is changing, and e-books are different. I don’t want to keep the same workflows, but I think the workflows need to be closely aligned, and work in a ‘well seamed’ manner – and be carried out by the same systems and staff. This isn’t necessarily the same thing as having a single workflow, and certainly not as keeping the same old workflow.

Mike noting that one of the things people say they like about books is ‘the smell’ – we get a bit obsessed perhaps with all the details – but users have other concerns 🙂 Mike is reflecting on the physical nature of books – showing a slide of his 1 year old daughter – and saying how she interacts with books – i.e. the print book as an interface – so he doesn’t see print books going anywhere. I don’t disagree with this for at least the forseeable future. Whether it is true specifically for academic libraries is a slightly different issue I think – and certainly in terms of the majority of our acquisition – this could change towards ‘e’ much quicker than the general environment.

Mike saying how vendors provide ‘slip plans’ and ‘approval plans’ – selection processes where vendors automatically supply titles on the basis of a profile. This can be done for e-books just as for print (although ‘approval plans’ more complex and will take some development for e-books).

Mike saying that vendors like YBP are about providing access to as much of the ‘universe’ of material as possible – this remains true with ‘e’.

Mike is covering a lot of the similarities between print and e-books, and where vendors can provide the same services. This is fine, but to be honest not very interesting. The places where they differ, and why they differ, are really the issues.

What Mike is trying to do seems to be to stress the advantages over a ‘middleman’ rather than buying direct from the publisher. I don’t really disagree with any of it, but it feels a bit defensive.

Mike now asking, with all these similarities, why are libraries changing their workflows for e-books, and saying ‘keep the book vendor involved’ what he isn’t engaging with is stuff like licensing, issues with ownership and access rights, pricing models, single platform deals, package deals and lack of title-by-title purchase models etc.

Mike noting that for YBP the fact that e-book prices vary from library-to-library (e.g. based on size of institution, fte count etc.) is a really problem – makes it very difficult to display a ‘list price’.

Now, Laura Wrubel from University of Maryland, talking about E-books in a Consortial Setting

Laura listing a number of e-book evaluation criteria. A wide range of criteria from availability to OpenURL compliance.

After negotiating a number of deals with a variety of vendors, they found that there wasn’t widespread uptake of the deals in the consortium – so why not? Laura lists a number of challenges:

• Building broad interest around content or platform
• No shared pool of funds in the consortium
• Complicated pricing models
• Limited cost savings
• Lack of shared access (i.e. no access to what other members of the consortium have bought – which would happen in the print environment via interlibrary loan)
• Licensing issues

Laura noting that they have had some success negotiating limited shared access deals. Laura also upbeat about the current models of e-book access changing as libraries work with the vendors to understand the best models for both sides.

Laura outlining the more successful scenarios:

• Central pot of money
• Collaboration on content selection
• Shared access to same set of content

Laura saying that at the consortial level they haven’t managed to ‘mainstream’ e-book workflows, although individual libraries within the consortium have done this, ordering books on a title-by-title basis from their usual vendors.

At Maryland, the catalogue is still the ‘main’ access route for library resources. Currently they get MARC records from the e-book vendors, but they are looking at other possibilities (e.g. OCLC)

Laura noting that e-book identifiers (i.e. ISBN) is much less consistent than e-journal identifiers. Whereas journals may have one ISSN and one eISSN (in generally) – there can be many different ISBNs associated with a single ‘work’ for books.

Maryland use a link resolver (SFX) for e-journals, but there is much less representation of e-books in the Knowledgebase. At the moment they pull the URL out from the 856 field in the catalogue to display in the resolver menu based on the campus the user is on (although I think the problem with this is that it only works when you click through to the link resolver from the OPAC – or at least where you can match the ISBN – back to the problem above)

Laura saying that at the moment ‘ebooks’ are relatively well defined but that won’t remain true (I don’t agree – they aren’t well defined – see my previous post on this!)

Laura says we need multiple routes of access to our e-books collections.

To sum up Laura says we:

• Need consistent consortial models
• Need to bring licensed e-book content into mainstream and integrate with other sites (including course manage systems, search engines etc.)

My first ALA session proper is an ACLTS session on e-books. Currently our stock of e-books at Imperial is relatively small, but it is growing rapidly, and I think in the next year or so we could easily see an explosion – we are certainly at the point where we would consider the e-book to the print alternative in some circumstances. We’ve also got an e-books day planned for mid-July where some of the major vendors of e-book platforms/content are going to come in and show us their systems etc. so hopefully this session will be good preparation for that.

I’ll be interested if the session includes ‘ebooks’ in

First up, Aline Soules on “Definition, Selection, Users”

Starting off with some questions:

• What is an e-book?
• Who selects e-books?
• What do our users want from e-books?

What is an e-book?

Aline suggestion a definition

• Content presented in e-format in one complete unit
• A print monograph issued in e-formation
• A “material type” GMD [electronic resource]

However, Aline believes we need to ‘think differently’, and consider things such as:

• Digitized materials
  • e.g. Google Book Project
• Institute for the Future of the Book – looing at “networked” books through use of blogs, e.g. GAM3R 7H3ORY
• Labyrinth Project (UCLA)
  • “Mysteries and Desire: Serach the Worlds of John Rechy” – available as a CD-ROM from Amazon
• Moveable texts
  • Flash poetry – something that can’t be represented in ‘static’ print, as it relies on movement of words around the screen.
• Integration of text, images, film clips, etc.
  • Test with images vs images with text (digital storytelling) www.inms.umn.edu/elements and www.coe.uh.edu/digital-storytelling
  • E-book vs. database e.g. Alexander Press
• Combination creations
  • David Goldberg’s forthcoming book – he couldn’t afford the rights to the images he wanted to include, so instead he is providing URLs to the images/content that he is referencing – so a print book at relies on the web to be meaningful
• Web sites
  • LC’s American Memory Project
  • Whitman Archive
  • Although we may consider these websites, Aline says that they are essentially collections of monographs

So – Aline says, “What is an e-book?”, and suggests that there are multiple definitions. When she asked a series of people what they thought an e-book she found that they came up with different ideas focussing on different aspects, but many agreed that what we had now was simply a transition to something not yet invented.

Aline is saying that she feels we are moving from a model of ‘peer-review’ before publication, to a more evolutionary situation, where texts are amended as ‘feedback’ or ‘contribution’ is made.

Who selects e-books?

E-Books may be bought:

• In packages
  • by vendor, or by publisher
  • by consortium
• Individual titles
  • Consortium
  • Individual selectors
• Digitized books
  • Vendor/Selection committess
  • …

Aline is saying that she feels that often selection is based on ‘practicialities’ – i.e. ‘what is attainable’ rather than necessarily ‘what is wanted’ – because of the models of acquistions. She feels this is a problem – I agree…

What do users want from e-books?

What do student users want?

• 2008 Global Student E-book Survey by ebrary  (looks like you have to fill in a form to get the survey – what a shame they don’t just let you download it!)
• Aline runs through the responses to question 13

What do faculty users and librarians want? There was an ebrary survey in 2007 which covers some of these points.

Aline now relating what her students want:

• Remote access
• Anytime, anywhere access
• Ability to download, print
• Ability to identify easily the exact text that fits their assignement
• Ability to cut and past as much text as they want
• Ability to email to themselves a citation in their format of choic or at least APA and MEA, just as they do in databases
• Ability to borrow a title that’s not owned by their particular library, either through their consortium or interlibrary loan

Aline concerned that we are ‘giving up’ interlibrary loan, and moving to a model where you absolutely need institutional affiliation to get access.

What does the library want?

• Cost value
• Abiltiy to integrat e-books technically; handshaing among e-books and the catalog, federate seatch tool, web site etc.
• Something that will download to students’ computers without undue difficulty
• Move away from priprietayr platforms
• Easy authentication
• Archiving
• …
• What the students want

Aline making the point that we have a load of priorities which aren’t the same as the students (which I can see, but I think that some of the things we want are implicit in what the students want)

Now Aline coming onto Role of Acquisitiosn with E-books:

• Keeping up with and understanding the evolution that’s underway
  • Do we ever give up formats?
  • Understanding that the pigeon-holes we’ve used for years aren’t going to absorb all the new inventions that are coming
  • Understanding what we’re acquiring
    • Somthing fixed in time or evolving
    • A book or a byte?
    • A purchase, a rental or simple, an acquistion
• Making contracts work with the user in mind
  • More of them
  • More complex

Aline making some excellent point, questioning whether we will continue to see a distinction between monograph acquisitions and subscriptions – she sees a move (which I agree with) towards subscriptions models across the board. She also makes a point that we call it ‘acquisitions’ not ‘purchase’ – not everything we acquire may be paid for.

A quick but good run through the issues.

Some notes from Aline available at http://libresos.pbwiki.com/ebkwkflows

My first ALA session proper is an ACLTS session on e-books. Currently our stock of e-books at Imperial is relatively small, but it is growing rapidly, and I think in the next year or so we could easily see an explosion – we are certainly at the point where we would consider the e-book to the print alternative in some circumstances. We’ve also got an e-books day planned for mid-July where some of the major vendors of e-book platforms/content are going to come in and show us their systems etc. so hopefully this session will be good preparation for that.

I’ll be interested if the session includes ‘ebooks’ in

First up, Aline Soules on “Definition, Selection, Users”

Starting off with some questions:

• What is an e-book?
• Who selects e-books?
• What do our users want from e-books?

What is an e-book?

Aline suggestion a definition

• Content presented in e-format in one complete unit
• A print monograph issued in e-formation
• A “material type” GMD [electronic resource]

However, Aline believes we need to ‘think differently’, and consider things such as:

• Digitized materials
  • e.g. Google Book Project
• Institute for the Future of the Book – looing at “networked” books through use of blogs, e.g. GAM3R 7H3ORY
• Labyrinth Project (UCLA)
  • “Mysteries and Desire: Serach the Worlds of John Rechy” – available as a CD-ROM from Amazon
• Moveable texts
  • Flash poetry – something that can’t be represented in ‘static’ print, as it relies on movement of words around the screen.
• Integration of text, images, film clips, etc.
  • Test with images vs images with text (digital storytelling) www.inms.umn.edu/elements and www.coe.uh.edu/digital-storytelling
  • E-book vs. database e.g. Alexander Press
• Combination creations
  • David Goldberg’s forthcoming book – he couldn’t afford the rights to the images he wanted to include, so instead he is providing URLs to the images/content that he is referencing – so a print book at relies on the web to be meaningful
• Web sites
  • LC’s American Memory Project
  • Whitman Archive
  • Although we may consider these websites, Aline says that they are essentially collections of monographs

So – Aline says, “What is an e-book?”, and suggests that there are multiple definitions. When she asked a series of people what they thought an e-book she found that they came up with different ideas focussing on different aspects, but many agreed that what we had now was simply a transition to something not yet invented.

Aline is saying that she feels we are moving from a model of ‘peer-review’ before publication, to a more evolutionary situation, where texts are amended as ‘feedback’ or ‘contribution’ is made.

Who selects e-books?

E-Books may be bought:

• In packages
  • by vendor, or by publisher
  • by consortium
• Individual titles
  • Consortium
  • Individual selectors
• Digitized books
  • Vendor/Selection committess
  • …

Aline is saying that she feels that often selection is based on ‘practicialities’ – i.e. ‘what is attainable’ rather than necessarily ‘what is wanted’ – because of the models of acquistions. She feels this is a problem – I agree…

What do users want from e-books?

What do student users want?

• 2008 Global Student E-book Survey by ebrary  (looks like you have to fill in a form to get the survey – what a shame they don’t just let you download it!)
• Aline runs through the responses to question 13

What do faculty users and librarians want? There was an ebrary survey in 2007 which covers some of these points.

Aline now relating what her students want:

• Remote access
• Anytime, anywhere access
• Ability to download, print
• Ability to identify easily the exact text that fits their assignement
• Ability to cut and past as much text as they want
• Ability to email to themselves a citation in their format of choic or at least APA and MEA, just as they do in databases
• Ability to borrow a title that’s not owned by their particular library, either through their consortium or interlibrary loan

Aline concerned that we are ‘giving up’ interlibrary loan, and moving to a model where you absolutely need institutional affiliation to get access.

What does the library want?

• Cost value
• Abiltiy to integrat e-books technically; handshaing among e-books and the catalog, federate seatch tool, web site etc.
• Something that will download to students’ computers without undue difficulty
• Move away from priprietayr platforms
• Easy authentication
• Archiving
• …
• What the students want

Aline making the point that we have a load of priorities which aren’t the same as the students (which I can see, but I think that some of the things we want are implicit in what the students want)

Now Aline coming onto Role of Acquisitiosn with E-books:

• Keeping up with and understanding the evolution that’s underway
  • Do we ever give up formats?
  • Understanding that the pigeon-holes we’ve used for years aren’t going to absorb all the new inventions that are coming
  • Understanding what we’re acquiring
    • Somthing fixed in time or evolving
    • A book or a byte?
    • A purchase, a rental or simple, an acquistion
• Making contracts work with the user in mind
  • More of them
  • More complex

Aline making some excellent point, questioning whether we will continue to see a distinction between monograph acquisitions and subscriptions – she sees a move (which I agree with) towards subscriptions models across the board. She also makes a point that we call it ‘acquisitions’ not ‘purchase’ – not everything we acquire may be paid for.

A quick but good run through the issues.

Some notes from Aline available at http://libresos.pbwiki.com/ebkwkflows

After about 12 hours in the air, 2 hours in cars, and a few extra hours hanging round airports, I’ve arrived safely in Anaheim for the ALA Annual Conference. I didn’t get off to a particularly auspicious start when after checking into my hotel (Paradise Pier – a Disney Hotel – I’ve got a Mickey Mouse lamp in my room and view of the themepark!) I couldn’t get onto the ‘net. Since I’d brought a minimum of paper with me, relying on access to various websites for information about the conference, this left me a bit stranded.

Anyway, now with a replacement network cable, I’m online (still can’t get the hotel wireless to work), and settled in. I took a walk around the area just to see where everything is, but missed the first session I wanted to get to – the NISO/AVIAC meeting. Oh well – plenty more to do over the next 3 days.

Tonight I’ve decided to go along to the Open Gaming Night – mainly because I really, really, want to have a go on Rock Band, but also because I suspect some bloggers I read might be there (I know Jenny Levine will be there), and it would be nice to meet them…

After about 12 hours in the air, 2 hours in cars, and a few extra hours hanging round airports, I’ve arrived safely in Anaheim for the ALA Annual Conference. I didn’t get off to a particularly auspicious start when after checking into my hotel (Paradise Pier – a Disney Hotel – I’ve got a Mickey Mouse lamp in my room and view of the themepark!) I couldn’t get onto the ‘net. Since I’d brought a minimum of paper with me, relying on access to various websites for information about the conference, this left me a bit stranded.

Anyway, now with a replacement network cable, I’m online (still can’t get the hotel wireless to work), and settled in. I took a walk around the area just to see where everything is, but missed the first session I wanted to get to – the NISO/AVIAC meeting. Oh well – plenty more to do over the next 3 days.

Tonight I’ve decided to go along to the Open Gaming Night – mainly because I really, really, want to have a go on Rock Band, but also because I suspect some bloggers I read might be there (I know Jenny Levine will be there), and it would be nice to meet them…