UCD eBooks day

UCD Library eBooks day July 25 th 2008

Introductions and Welcome
http:// del.icio.us/poppypan/ebooks

Timetable Part One : general overview Info Skills Room Health Sciences 10.00 eBooks overview: key developments; key projects; key reports; key websites and blogs Ros Pan UCD eBooks Group final report Ros Pan What approach are other Irish university libraries taking? Ros Pan 11.00 COFFEE provided Part Two: key UCD eBook activities now 11.20 eBooks and IRM, management and discovery. Progress to date, challenges and plans John-Paul Kiernan & Eoin McCarney 11.40 Checking and selecting individual eBook titles: towards mainstreaming. Report on the HSS pilot going live in September Lorna Dodd 12.00 eBooks: the Special Collections perspective Evelyn Flanagan 12.10 The subject eBooks package. An update on what we have and is planned, plus a chance to try some of these out using worksheets in the info skills room Lorna Dodd, Tony Eklof, Julia Barrett 13.00 END

1. A selection of large eBook themes
What are eBooks now and into the future
What does online reading do to us?
What is the future of print books
How will a take-up of eBooks impact on the role of the Library
Open Access eBooks
The offline eBook reader

Definition of an eBook
Hard to decide where the boundary between online reports, grey literature and “real” eTexts, eReference or eMonographs is – all full text is not an eBook
When going online attempts are made to EMULATE a print book (now even have attempt to emulate bookstore as well in front of Amazon) or the data may be taken apart and presented more as DATABASE not individual discrete titles
If marked up properly links can be provided in to individual chapters and paragraphs of an eBook, opening up the content but breaking apart the book concept (like journals and issues will fade in favour of articles as the unit some people say)
Some eBooks are still very conservative – there is however potential for redefining what the book is online and using the particular benefits of online….

Book 2.0 – what will eBooks become?
Searching the text would be a widely available enhancement
An e-book could be static and 2-dimensional if it is simply an electronic facsimile e.g. a pdf file.. But it could also be a dynamic, multi-media, multi-dimensional object – leveraging internet technology… images, sound, video, related texts… Sophie is software for writing and reading rich media documents in a networked environment. Sophie’s goal is to open up the world of multimedia authoring to a wide range of people and institutions and in so doing to redefine the notion of a book … to include both rich media
and mechanisms for reader feedback and conversation in dynamic margins
Open review of books made available on the internet as they are being authored is another trend

Adobe vision.. In Feb 2008 workshop
“ ..The focus will be on Adobe’s vision for the future of digital texts beyond “print page replica” models and traditional eBooks, including device-adaptive rendering, integrated rich media and interactivity, and social capabilities from preview widgets through reader-generated content.”

“ We are aiming to integrate author-generated content with the author's own"book" content--through our Author Assistant and our Browse Inside applications available on harpercollins.com. We think it makes the most sense for readers to have an integrated experience of book and author --why should they have to go to one site to look at the book, and many others to hear the author's voice?”

Access to the content of the book not the whole title

Taken to the section on your topic..

PsycINFO to PsycBOOKS

What is online reading doing to us?
Nicholas Carr “Is Google making us stupid ” http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/print/200807/google
“ The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle”
“ ..Media.. Supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought”
“ I now have almost totally lost the ability to read and absorb a longish article on the web or in print”
How internet use affects cognition…

What is online reading doing to us?
“ It is clear that users are not reading online in the traditional sense; indeed there are signs that new forms of “reading” are emerging as users “power browse” horizontally through titles, contents pages and abstracts going for quick wins. It almost seems that they go online to avoid reading in the traditional sense.”

What is the future of the print book?
The reverse issue is what is the future of the printed book or pBook if the eBook gains in scope
Not got time to go into that huge topic today
Wide variation of views on that
Is a strong view that the print book will survive due to its unique nature and the benefits of having a contained set of content rather than endless expanding navigation across online content
The book has a value as an object, in addition to the value of the content within
The other camp sees the future of print books as... limited!

A shift from pBooks to eBooks means….
eBooks are new kids on the block in terms of digital resources
Knowledge of virtual scholar’s information seeking behaviour based on e-journal studies; they appeal to researchers and scientists.
Know much less about behaviour of students, arts/humanities scholars and some social scientists – the majority academic community
In a vacuum, work with an e-journal stereotype of information seeking and that is dangerous
Hence CIBER interest in e-books and finally some research being done
We might be at a tipping point – implications of OUR BIGGEST USER GROUP STUDENTS not having to visit the library in future is immense – is UCD at a tipping point with eBooks?

Library current use by students - How often do you pay a visit to your university library, physically or virtually? All student users (n=15,842) (from JISC survey, 2008)

Library current use by students - How often do you pay a visit to your university library, physically or virtually? All teacher users (n=1,844).) (from JISC survey, 2008) Staff really are deserting the physical library, although obviously not in all subject areas. Online access has clearly become absolutely central to their scholarly experience.

Why do you go to the library [in person]? All student library users (n=15,508)

The Library RIP?
The expected popularity of e-books will come with as yet an unknown price for university libraries. Fewer people will visit the library . Academic libraries tend to occupy an enormous amount of premium space and this space is largely filled by books and students. Provide access in students’ dorms, bars and recreational space to the relatively small number of books they need and who would bet against a huge drop in library visits? This, of course, will then lead to questions about whether the library needs all the space it occupies. While the advent of e-books in numbers will mean libraries will become more remote from their users, it will also mean that publishers will become ever closer, because they will have all the knowledge of how the user behaves – the users’ footfalls now take place in their virtual space. Furthermore, they can offer the products directly to the user. Indeed, with e-textbooks, e-monographs, e-journals and e-reference works being bundled together in some publishers’ offerings it might be the publisher who will provide the e-library experience.
From CILIP November 2007 E-books: how are users responding? David Nicholas et al

What might the info environment be like in 2017?
“ The inexorable rise of the eBook
..we expect print sales to diminish sharply as electronic publishing initiatives such as blogs, RSS, integrated media players, podcasting and publishing-on-demand devices become established parts of the information landscape
Electronic books, driven by consumer demand, will finally become established as the primary format for educational textbooks and scholarly books and monographs, as well as reference formats.”

Open Access eBooks
Project Gutenberg, others like World Public Library and Internet Archive, Million books project - there are many
Quite a few are on our eBook listing
The World eBook Fair takes place each year for a month and really provides a free access point for many of these free collections
Google Books would probably be the MAIN project in this area, huge controversy and publicity and will return to that later

Offline mobile eBooks readers
We are focusing on web-mediated eBooks
We assume that mobile devices will get better at displaying web pages and so they will be viewable on the move
But there is the alternative strand of DEDICATED and OFFLINE book readers to consider – lumpy models have been coming out for years and flopping
Recently the dedicated reader has received a fillip with Amazon launching the Kindle and the rival Sony Book reader also selling in some numbers
Mainly leisure and vocational titles… is this going to get serious and will the Library need to respond with some service?

Offline mobile eBooks readers
Amazon Kindle http:// www.youtube.com/watch?v = PBCzIDbRJvs
Sony book reader http:// www.youtube.com/watch?v =6sKBsp77PY0
OR you can go for the multi-purpose approach and add an eBook reader to your iPhone or iTouch…
http:// www.youtube.com/watch?v =9I9UpmWasxY
“ Although Arthur Andersen famously predicted a billion-dollar e-Book market would be here by now, 2007 was a big year for the e-Book faithful, with the launch of Amazon's Kindle, the first experiments with delivery of digital books on revolutionary new mobile devices like the iPhone and the $100-laptop “

Recent comparisons

2. Projects
SuperBook
JISC national eBook observatory
Google Books

SuperBook project “planning for the eBook revolution”
Work undertaken by CIBER at UCL
Was done FOR publishers Emerald and Wiley
Did a survey of University College London users
Did some deep log analysis (DLA) of usage of 3 eBook platforms over 3 months which were made available – OSO, Taylor and Francis and Wiley packages
Oct 2006/Oct 2007

SuperBook
“ SuperBook is an action research study, which involved ‘dropping’ over 3000 selected e-books from OUP (Oxford Scholarship Online), Wiley (Interscience) and Taylor & Francis into the UCL information environment, and then assessing, by means of deep log analysis, what happened as a result. “

First some SuperBook preliminary survey results…. Experience of using eBooks

The diversity of eBook views
The demographics of e-book use are complex
Age
Gender
Subject interest
Level of student
“ the need to avoid `one-size-fits-all’ prescriptions based on a superficial reading of highly aggregated data, as in so much library survey work .”

Age was a key factor in relation to amount of use of eBooks
“ Partly because the academic teaching body is superannuated …. its members have not kept up with the new maps of knowledge. Wisdom, the fruit of age, doesn't cut it any more. Or, at least, not entirely. A major destabilising factor is that young students are, in the main, better at handling things electronic than their (much) elders and betters.” John Sutherland in Education Guardian Tuesday July 8th http://education.guardian.co.uk/higher/columnist/story/0,,2289553,00.html

What sort of eBooks did they use?

Summary of possible advantages
Easy access to content
On-demand availability
Cannot lose, steal or damage it
Ability to search within the text
Ability to cross search a collection of books
Links to other resources e.g. dictionaries, thesauri
No physical space requirement
No special device needed – standard web browsers
Customizable search interfaces
Transportable
Access from anywhere
From The Whole Digital Library Handbook, edited by Diane Kresh

There are also downsides…

Perception of eBooks v print

How users found out about eBooks – overall

How many DID find out about Library eBooks? Students, especially at Masters’ (41%) or undergraduate (34%) level are much more aware of elibrary book provision than are academic (24%) and research staff (21%). engineering sciences (41%) and social and historical sciences (38%) are the most e-book aware, life sciences (22%) and mathematical and physical sciences (20%) the least

Library collections print or electronic are not the only information sources..
Three clusters of factors are apparent. The first cluster brings together visiting other (i.e. non- UCL) libraries and catalogues, publishers’ catalogues and web sites, and book reviews. These are all formal or semi-formal systems of literature control that lie outside the ambit of UCL Library Services and are suggestive of specialist research requirements.
The second cluster brings together searching Amazon or Google Book Search, searching Google or other popular web sites,and visiting bookshops. This grouping suggests a fundamental mode of behaviour that is highly independent of library systems and provision.
The third cluster comprises activities (following up reading lists, personal recommendation from friends and colleagues, consulting UCL Library Services in person or consulting the catalogue) that are institutionally focused .

How should the Library market eBooks?

And some results from the Deep log analysis – from use of 1200 titles in OSO Oxford Scholarship Online…
A cross-searchable library containing the full text of over 1,200 e-monographs on Economics, Philosophy, Political Science, and Religion studied logs for 3 month period
Reach: 36% of titles used (Wiley, 20%) within three months – 64% were NOT used!
Concentration in use: top 20 titles accounted for 43% of usage.
Just 2 titles accounted for 12% of total usage
Big variations in use month to month and for subjects = tied to rhythms of teaching

Cont.
People spend nearly half time viewing content, rest of the time they are trying to find their way to it (or out of it) – lack of visible model of a book could be reason this is taking so long to navigate
In more than half sessions more than 4 online pages were viewed = 20 print equivalent pages
25% of sessions involved 3+ books being used
Catalogued books (1/3 randomly catalogued) much more likely to be used. UCL catalogued e-books attracted over twice the usage as compared to non-catalogued ones. Wiley exactly the same result

Cont.
66% of usage was on campus with lot of exploration not leading to full text reading
Off campus use a third and more focused when off campus – only 10% sessions did not result in reading full text pages, much higher than the on campus users
Different usages by subject. Question is “Better list of eBooks or better practice on part of teaching staff and learners?”

How long were users online reading the eBooks?

User comments about short reading time and using eBooks for a quick update or a preliminary assessement of relevance
“ I can update my knowledge very quickly, you see the sheer number of books is overwhelming, if I can look at them very quickly – you know within 15 minutes, I can look at 3 or 4 books – and get some very superficial knowledge of what is in them, nevertheless it improves my scholarship, because in the back of my mind, these books already exist “
“ To tell you the truth – if I have a notion that this book is going to be remotely useful, then it’s going to be print. I’m not going to spend too much time – I mean if I feel that the book has something to give me and it’s of value putting it on paper then it’s going to go on paper.”

Deep log analysis – routes to eBooks

JISC National eBooks Observatory “taking research methods to a new high”
Still running – done the survey yet to do the log analysis – will be analysing for 12 full months
36 textbooks are available freely unlimited access
Available to all UK Higher Education institutions
As with Superbook they started with a survey and will then analyse usage logs for a full year
Survey results large and recent – March 2008

Do you use eBooks? n=20000

Variation: subject, student level – also as with SuperBook gender with males more likely to use eBooks, age made little difference
Percentages who have used an e-book.
U/G P/G
Business 61.6 79.7
Engineering 64.7 71.9
Media studies 61.2 64.3
Medicine 55.1 61.4

How many eBooks have you used in the last month ( n=10,947)

Last time you read an eBook, how did you get hold of it? n=12,026 92% of eBook use of the last book was for work or study purposes

How did you read the contents of e-books ( n =12,042) Students Teachers I read the contents from a screen 62.6 57.8 I printed the contents and read from paper 6.4 6.5 A bit of both 30.6 35.3 I don’t remember 0.5 0.5

How long do you think you spend reading an e-book from the screen in one session? ( n =12,038)

How much of the last e-book you viewed did you read online? ( n =12,014)

Library resources OF ALL KINDS are not the most popular - How dependent are you on the following information resources to complete your academic assignments? All students (n=15,828) rating on scale 1-4

Where do you mostly access your university library online? All student and teacher users (n=16,892). Turning to the virtual library, staff and students exhibit very different locational preferences. The value to students of being able to access library services at home is very clear

Have you used any of the electronic books that are available from your university library? All students and teachers (n=16,904).

How did you first find out about them? All student and teacher users (n=7,689). This figure confirms an earlier finding of the UCL SuperBook study, that the library catalogue is an important vector for discovering e-books. The library website and staff contact are also very influential.

UCD information..

The massive Google Digitization Project
Launched in 2004
Started with Michigan, Harvard, NYPL, Stanford, Oxford… now has around >19 partners
"Harvard has the greatest university library in the world. If this experiment is successful, we have the potential to provide the world's greatest system for dissemination as well."
Each library gets a digital copy of the texts and it costs them nothing
"We have been digitizing texts for years now to make them more accessible and searchable, but with books, as opposed to journals, such efforts have been severely limited in scope for both technical and financial reasons. The Google arrangement catapults our effective digital output from the boutique scale to the truly industrial. Through this program and others like it, Stanford intends to promote learning and to stimulate innovation."

Books.google.ie

Google Books - issues
A single commercial company has a near monopoly as Microsoft close down Live Books "I wouldn’t say Google is 100 percent of the digital book world, but it’s getting near 90 percent."
“ ‘ Do we really want to put this one company in the position of being the filter for the world’s information?’" Siva Vaidhyanathan , a media specialist and cultural historian at the University of Virginia … the Microsoft retreat shows the risk of depending on a for-profit company to pay for digitization”…
Poor quality scanning & OCR – examples are available "Google is doing a very, very poor job…. Their OCR is very inaccurate, the image quality is very poor. You find cutoff text…. You find dirty text. You find incomplete pages."
Copyright issues – they say OK to scan and OCR all text so they can index it but now show it, copyright owners say the act of digitizing it is illegal regardless of any use made

Implications of Google Books ….
the long-term potential of the Google library program as creating a universal virtual library, one that would—in time—challenge the role of and need for physical libraries…this development, however desirable, could mark the beginning of the end of brick-and-mortar libraries. We shall see …
Google Book Search bibliography available http://www.digital-scholarship.org/gbsb/gbsb.htm
Google Partners page lists libraries involved plus lots of other information http:// books.google.com/googlebooks/partners.html

WIT and Google Books links…

4. A few eBook websites, organizations and blogs
Print is Dead http://printisdeadblog.com/
Teleread http://www.teleread.org/blog/
Institute for the Future of the Book http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/

5. UCD eBooks Group final report
The group was a sub-set of ERG and met from early 2006
Ceased May 2008 and eBooks work will be taken on by ERG directly from now on
A final report covers in some detail all the work done on eReference, eTextbooks and eMonographs

Aggregators are not our main focus
We do not feel choosing any one aggregator (platform with multi-publisher content) is the way forward for scholarly academic library.
Lot of focus on NetLibrary, MyILibrary, DawsonEra and EBrary and idea of signing up to just ONE of these as eBook platform We have rejected that. Convenient not to have lots of platforms but one platform will not work
For single titles on reading lists we need to get it wherever we can source it
Schools are focusing on smaller subject stables of eBook titles not these big aggregators.
Aggregators are not our primary focus for users

eReference
Improvements in eReference titles have been made, notably subscribing to Britannica
Improvements in access to the titles has been made – web info page and listing
The FUTURE of subscribed or purchased eReference is under pressure due to the amount of free information in wikipedia and many other online sources
It may not be authoritative, peer reviewed etc but it seems to be where people go a lot
An interesting time for eReference

What to catalogue?
An issue that emerged was what exactly to put into the catalogue
Should records for key but FREE titles be added to the catalogue?
Where we have a print title and there is a free eBook available with the publisher should we put in links to these?
Who should add in all these 856 fields to the MARC records?

Other points to note
Many subject packages on many platforms will be purchased by Schools
Every time we check and select a reading list text we need to check if available as an eBook and decide whether to purchase as an eBook = mainstreaming purchase of individual title eBooks
At the time of our work the number of titles from select reading lists that were available from ANY aggregator was very small and publishers reluctant to make key texts available as eBooks
We need MARC records in the catalogue for our eBooks
eBook management is a strand of work that has to be taken into IRM and presents a different set of challenges and workflowsto traditional print purchase
Other presentations today will cover these points

6. Other Irish University libraries
E-mailed round enquiring about approach and progress at other Irish universities
Maynooth , UL and DIT are examples to compare

Maynooth
Up to now they subscribed to eBook packages and individual titles whenever and wherever appropriate
Primarily they focus on buying eBook packages though there are occasions when they buy individual titles for lecturers
This Summer decided to formalise policies mainly because they are reaching a critical mass
They are now preparing an eBook Collection Development Policy
They have decided moving forward to concentrate on incorporating eBooks into their Short Loan collection and replacing core print text books with core text eBooks where possible

Maynooth cont.
Resource discovery has been at package level via website listing http:// library.nuim.ie/resources/ebooks_list.shtml
This summer they have started to load MARC records to the catalogue and intend to load them for all their eBook packages (plus things like video clips in Literature Online)
Their OPAC will be the one central point to locate information on their eBooks
For titles where the license only allows closed access to a fixed group they have a dedicated space in Moodle VLE to store these
Mary Antonesa, Information Services, The Library, NUI Maynooth, Co. Kildare, Ireland.
Tel: 00353-1-7086446
Fax: 00353-1-6286008
URL: http:// library.nuim.ie /

Limerick
In the early stages with ebooks
Have the safari project books and some reference type books mainly (but not exclusively) via IReL plus packages like ACLS which are mainly eBooks
These are listed on a web page (on redesigned but not yet released website ) and are also in the catalogue at the collection level for the packages
In next weeks to start to import MARC records into the catalogue for titles in the packages
Not decided whether to create new records for the e-version where we already have print or no – nice for users to merge but easy to replace and alter if on separate records

Limerick cont.
We have 1000s of hotlinks to catalogue records for monograph publications where we have print & electronic so I suppose these are also eBooks. (The issue here is keeping the links up to date). Many of these are government publications
There has been some interest in an ebooks ‘collection’ in the opac, but this has problems. Should it be e-only books in which case I could use the sequence to select, but e with print would not be included unless we added an item record as well as a hypertext link
So far we don’t use an aggregator although this may change very soon
In the next day or two we will start to purchase individual ebooks using the dawsonera platform. These will be catalogued. We are using this platform because it fits seamlessly into our normal acquisition procedures – Dawson’s enterbooks / enterprofile list print & e –versions together for the faculty librarians to choose Jane Gribbon, U of Limerick

DIT
To date not had a specific policy apart from Kevin Street
Trying to add reference resource individual titles from packages into the catalogue and virtual reference desk
Investigated moving core textbooks to eBooks at Kevin Street – only a small % of titles are available in any package
School of Computing identified 164 titles in maths and computing and these have been purchased
These Netlibrary titles will be in the catalogue and on A-Z listings
Looking at how to make free eBooks more available via catalogue records or other ways

Coffee break!

UCD eBooks day

by Ros Pan on Jul 22, 2008

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UCD eBooks day — Presentation Transcript