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)<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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<\/a> (Early English Books Online). However, we buy and manage this basically as a single item – pretty much like a database subscription.<\/p>\n With the Google books<\/a> developments and the Open Content Alliance<\/a>, 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[21],"class_list":["post-293","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-igelu-2006"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.meanboyfriend.com\/overdue_ideas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/293","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.meanboyfriend.com\/overdue_ideas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.meanboyfriend.com\/overdue_ideas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.meanboyfriend.com\/overdue_ideas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.meanboyfriend.com\/overdue_ideas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=293"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.meanboyfriend.com\/overdue_ideas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/293\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.meanboyfriend.com\/overdue_ideas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=293"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.meanboyfriend.com\/overdue_ideas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=293"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.meanboyfriend.com\/overdue_ideas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=293"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}