Group items tagged

Elsevier, a leading publisher of scientific, technical and medical (STM) information, today announced the availability of more than 4,000 eBooks on ScienceDirect. eBooks on ScienceDirect comprise high-quality selected titles published from 1995 to the present. These include scientific and technical books spanning 18 subject areas, as well as books from renowned imprints including Pergamon and Academic Press. The launch is a major expansion to the reference works, handbooks and book series already available on ScienceDirect.

"The digitization of millions of books under programs such as Google Book Search and Microsoft Live Search Books is dramatically expanding our ability to search and find information. The aim of these large-scale projects-to make content accessible-is interwoven with the question of how one keeps that content, whether digital or print, fit for use over time. This report by Oya Y. Rieger examines large-scale digital initiatives (LSDIs) to identify issues that will influence the availability and usability, over time, of the digital books these projects create. Ms. Rieger is interim assistant university librarian for digital library and information technologies at the Cornell University Library." The paper describes four large-scale projects-Google Book Search, Microsoft Live Search Books, Open Content Alliance, and the Million Book Project-and their digitization strategies. It then discusses a range of issues affecting the stewardship of the digital collections they create: selection, quality in content creation, technical infrastructure, and organizational infrastructure. The paper also attempts to foresee the likely impacts of large-scale digitization on book collections.

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)?

John Willinsky: "This paper reviews and addresses the critical issues currently confronting monograph publishing as a matter of reduced opportunities for scholars to pursue book-length projects. In response, it proposes an alternative approach to monograph publishing based on a modular design for an online system that would foster, manage, and publish monographs in digital and print forms using open source software developments, drawn from journal publishing, and social networking technologies that might contribute to not only to the sustainability of monograph publishing but to the quality of the resulting books."

"'E-journals: their use, value and impact' takes an in-depth look at how researchers in the UK use electronic journals, the value they bring to universities and research institutions and the contribution they make to research productivity, quality and outcomes. Journal publishers began to provide online access to full-text scholarly articles in the late 1990s, triggering a revolution in the scholarly communications process. A very high proportion of journal articles are now available online - 96 per cent of journal titles in science, technology and medicine, and 86 per cent of titles in the arts, humanities and social sciences. "

2006 San Jose State University study discussing the preferences of print vs. electronic resources in the university's library. Different disciplines prefer different formats. Access the full article through ScienceDirect.

Robert Chavez, Gregory Crane, Anne Sauer, Alison Babeu, Adrian Packel and Gabriel Weaver Abstract This paper provides an overview of the collaboration between the Perseus Project and the Digital Collection and Archives (DCA) at Tufts University in moving the collections of the Perseus Project into the DCA's Fedora based repository as well as a listing of potential services necessary to support a successful institutional repository.

This article examines what it will take to make digital respositories successful in the future. The authors of this article predict that value-added services such as linking documents to related or source documents will popularize digital repositories. The authors imagine partnerships between different libraries and collections will also strengthen the future of digital repositories.

This article investigates readers' requirements regarding fiction electronic books, as compared to electronic textbooks. The EBONI Project, which defined a set of best practice guidelines for designing electronic textbooks, provided the methodology to support an exploration of the usability of fiction ebooks in a recent study. It was found that the general guidelines for the design of textbooks on the Internet can also be applied to the design of fiction ebooks. Additionally, in terms of the electronic production of fiction ebooks, the same study suggested that concentrating on the appearance of text, rather than the technology itself, can lead to better quality publications to rival the print versions of fiction books. This article discusses these results together with some from similar studies in order to draw a picture of what readers expect from fiction ebooks.

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.

This is a 2002 article regarding the gradual transformation of the Princeton library from print to digital. It is interesting to note that this article was published before e-readers became widely available, as he does not predict much for the future of e-books. The article covers which branches of study prefer electronic and which do not, and the adaptation of electronic resources in the library.

Some of the findings that have proved to be of greatest interest have focused on these topics: * Attitudes towards the possibility of a transition away from print format, both for scholarly journals and monographs * Perceptions of libraries and their value, including specific library functions, and how these perceptions are changing * Preferences in research practices, including disciplinary differences and changes over time * Attitudes towards archiving of both print and electronic resources * Preferences that lead authors to choose among scholarly journals in which to publish their articles, as well as attitudes towards digital repositories

Follow the link on this page to the "in depth white paper" which is entitled, "Ithaka's 2006 Studies of Key Stakeholders in the Digital Transformation in Higher Education" dated August 18, 2008. The Table of Contents lists: INTRODUCTION; RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN THE LIBRARY AND THE FACULTY; DEPENDENCE ON ELECTRONIC RESOURCES; THE TRANSITION AWAY FROM PRINT FOR SCHOLARLY JOURNALS; FACULTY PUBLISHING PREFERENCES; E-BOOKS; DIGITAL REPOSITORIES; PRESERVATION OF SCHOLARLY JOURNALS; RECOMMENDATIONS; CONCLUSION. I have tagged this article, but it has some great research and will merit a blog entry.

Now, most of the attention on changes in scholarly publishing has been focused on e-journals. We wish to expand that circle of light so that it takes in the indexing of serials. The index, as every scholar knows, is critical to the quality of the research. The value of a library's serial collection is only as good as its indexing. What scholar has not wondered about the impact of overlapping, inconsistent, and incomplete indexing services on their work? When the weaknesses of the current indexing services are matched against the potential of open-access systems, we may have a tipping point in convincing scholars that the profession would be far better served by open-access publishing systems. We argue that a primary candidate for scholarly publishing's tipping point is the coherence, integration, and precision that these open-access systems can bring to the scholarly exchange and enhancement of knowledge, especially when compared to the current state of the serial index and the hit-and-miss of full-text Web searches.

There is a chart of costs of some electronic indexes, although it may be outdates (2000-01). This article examines the degree of overlap between different academic databases.

The INKE group is comprised of researchers and stakeholders at the forefront of computing in the humanities, text analysis, information studies, usability and interface design. The network is led by Canadian scholars, but includes members from the USA and the UK. It is comprised of those who are best-poised to understand the nature of the human record as it intersects with the computer. Our work is divided into four key research groupings: textual studies, user experience, interface design, and information management.