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"MyiLibrary™ is Ingram Digital Group's online eBook and eContent resource for academic, medical, professional and corporate libraries the world over. Our unique aggregation platform offers organizations the ability to acquire and access digital content on an individual title, publisher-specific or subject collection basis, based on their unique requirements and resources. With nearly 160,000 titles currently available, covering all major academic disciplines, and an additional 1,000 titles being added weekly, MyiLibrary has the most comprehensive online eContent resource available on the market today. We work with the world's leading commercial publishers including McGraw Hill, John Wiley, Oxford University Press, Cambridge University Press, Springer and Elsevier, as well as exclusive access to intergovernmental publications from groups such as The International Atomic Energy Agency, the International Labour Organization and the World Health Organization."

spacer Abstract The University of California's California Digital Library (CDL) formed an Ebook Task Force in August 2000 to evaluate academic libraries' experiences with electronic books (e-books), investigate the e-book market, and develop operating guidelines, principles and potential strategies for further exploration of the use of e-books at the University of California (UC). This article, based on the findings and recommendations of the Task Force Report [1], briefly summarizes task force findings, and outlines issues and recommendations for making e-books viable over the long term in the academic environment, based on the long-term goals of building strong research collections and providing high level services and collections to its users.

Issues provocative statements about future of libraries, e.g. in 5 years "library buildings will no longer house collections and will become campus community centers that function as part of the student services sector. Campus business offices will manage license and acquisition of digital content. These changes will lead campus administrators to align libraries with the administrative rather than the academic side of the organization."

This is an e-book by Wendy Pradt Lougee. The Table of Contents on this Website lists the following discussion topics: Collection Development, Federation, Library as Publisher, Information Access, Communities and Collaboratories, Access and the Semantic Web, User Services, Virtual Reference Systems, Information Literacy, Organizational Models, Library as Place

Size of LC collection: 138,313,427 items

The Penn Library is currently testing out various e-book products, both publisher specific as well as aggregate platforms, and it looking for input from graduate and professional students. Most of the these trials expire in mid to late October, so you would need to take a look at these within the next few weeks. The Library is interested in receiving feedback regarding both interface functionality as well as the quality/scope of the content offered. Are the publishers represented significant to you? Are there noticeably absent ones (from the aggregated collections)?

The Shift Away From Print By Eileen Gifford Fenton and Roger C. Schonfeld For most scholarly journals, the transition away from the print format and to an exclusive reliance on the electronic version seems all but inevitable, driven by user preferences for electronic journals and concerns about collecting the same information in two formats. But this shift away from print, in the absence of strategic planning by a higher proportion of libraries and publishers, may endanger the viability of certain journals and even the journal literature more broadly - while not even reducing costs in the ways that have long been assumed.

"at MPOW we are building a new library. So I'm thinking a LOT about several different time horizons. How do I plan for the realities of opening a new library in 2-3 years, but still allow for what I see as the likely outcomes for collections, services, and such in 5, or 10, or 20 years? This is a non-trivial problem…while no one can really tell whats coming, we have to remember that we are creating the future every day."

CIBER projects Live projects Digital Lives for the Arts & Humanities Research Council (September 2007 to April 2009). Evaluating the Usage and Impact of E-Journals in the UK for the Research Information Network (January to November 2008). UK National E-Books Observatory for JISC Collections (January 2008 to April 2009). Recently completed projects MaxData for the US Institute of Museum & Library Studies. Completed December 2007. SuperBook for a consortium of publishers. Completed December 2007. The Impact of Open Access Journal Publishing II for Oxford University Press. Completed November 2007. The Researcher of the Future for the British Library and JISC. Completed November 2007.

Evaluating e-books nationwide - JISC national e-books observatory project In this ground-breaking project over 120 UK universities will receive two years free access to reading materials in e-book form to support students studying in Business and Management, Medicine, Media Studies and Engineering. Titles will be licensed from a variety of publishers / aggregator in order to create mulit-publisher subject collections that are based on demand. During September to December 2007 these titles will be embedded in host institutions and their existence promoted. Then for a period of 12 months from January 2008 the use and impact of these titles in universities will be monitored by CIBER UCL employing deep log analysis (DLA) and follow-up qualitative work will be undertaken by University of Wales (Aberystwyth). Altogether it is expected that the National E-books Observatory will monitor and evaluate the behaviour of tens of thousands of UK students and faculty.

This page features the results of the collaboration between Google and the LOC to digitize Congressional hearings. I tried the Immigration collection, and found it easy to download and search the .pdf document. This is a great resource for researchers.

Collection of essays about ebooks, publishing shift

"The market for e-books has taken off, particularly in the world of education. Aggregators provide easy access to large collections of titles from many publishers, through a single interface. Consultants Ray Lonsdale and Chris Armstrong compare the offerings of the largest providers, and point to emerging trends."

A recent study by Jason Price and John McDonald of Claremont Colleges investigates whether a research library could pursue "paperless acquisition" for newly published books. Price and McDonald compared purchases of print books made by 5 research libraries in 2006 and 2007 to the catalogs 4 of major aggregators of ebooks for libraries (EBrary, NetLibrary, EBookLibrary, and MyILibrary). They found that around 70% of the libraries' print acquisitions are not available through the leading ebook aggregators. According to their preliminary analysis, there is a mismatch between the content that some publishers (such as Routledge and Oxford UP) make available through ebook aggregators and what libraries purchase; also, some university presses do not yet appear to be making their publications available as ebooks. In some disciplines (art, music, romance literatures), over 80% of library purchases are not available electronically, while in other disciplines (economics) only 53% are not available as ebooks.

Jason Epstein: "The huge, worldwide market for digital content, however, is not a fantasy. It will be very large, very diverse, and very surprising: its cultural impact cannot be imagined. E-books will be a significant factor in this uncertain future, but actual books printed and bound will continue to be the irreplaceable repository of our collective wisdom."

"And Now for Something Completely Different: Our Future from Outside the Box an ALCTS Symposium at ALA Midwinter 2010 Friday, January 15, 2010 from 8:30 a.m. - 5:00 p.m. Boston, Mass. Event Code: ALC2 Several cutting-edge thinkers will prepare short opinion pieces on future trends/issues/developments that are likely to impact research, instruction, and scholarly communication. These essays will serve as the foundation for panel discussions between some of these thinkers, selected respondents, and attendees on emerging roles for libraries and librarians, particularly collections and technical services librarians. This symposium will build upon the themes developed in the ALCTS Symposium, "Living Digital.""

"Clearly something important and fundamental is happening to books and reading. Libraries need to be part of this reading revolution, supporting and defending the rights of digital readers, experimenting with new reader services, collecting new genres and media formats, and providing access for all readers to the devices, networks, content, and online communities that will continue to emerge."

Abstract from the Website: "This paper is the second in a series of studies (see Gadd, E., C. Oppenheim, and S. Probets. RoMEO Studies 1: The impact of copyright ownership on author-self-archiving. Journal of Documentation. 59(3) 243-277) emanating from the UK JISC-funded RoMEO Project (Rights Metadata for Open-archiving). It considers the protection for research papers afforded by UK copyright law, and by e-journal licences. It compares this with the protection required by academic authors for open-access research papers as discovered by the RoMEO academic author survey. The survey used the Open Digital Rights Language (ODRL) as a framework for collecting views from 542 academics as to the permissions, restrictions, and conditions they wanted to assert over their works. Responses from self-archivers and non-archivers are compared. Concludes that most academic authors are primarily interested in preserving their moral rights, and that the protection offered research papers by copyright law is way in excess of that required by most academics. It also raises concerns about the level of protection enforced by e-journal licence agreements"

The e-Depot is a digital archiving environment that ensures long-term access to digital objects which would otherwise be threatened by rapidly evolving software and hardware platforms as well as media decay. It is the dedicated archiving environment for the KB's national electronic deposit collection. In addition, it will include the Dutch web archive and digitised master images. In line with the international nature of information provision, the KB has extended its e-Depot services to publishers worldwide. The e-Depot is supported by sustained research and development efforts geared towards maintaining the integrity of stored digital objects.

Adrian Sannier: "Finally, I suggest you burn down the library. All the books in the world are already digitized! Burn the thing down. Change it into a gathering place; a digital commons. Stop air conditioning the books! None of us has the Alexandria Library; Michigan, Oxford [UK], and Stanford [CA] have digitized their collections. What do you have that they don't? Why are you buying new books? Buy digital and let's spend some more time making those things level, flat, and transparent so a single search turns up everything we have. This has to change, because it's clear that people want to find information digitally. They want to search for it, find it, have it, and then amalgamate search results into a précis. "