e-books for FE:a digital library for FE colleges

RSC Eastern

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This is not technology

★The term e-book is already defunct, in the eyes of your users its just another collection of online stuff.

★It’s the content that matters, and what you do with it....★Many of the titles within the collection are available for the first time as

an e-book★However the collection needs to be signposted and promoted so that your

users can find and use this ‘stuff’★There are numerous ways of discovering and accessing e-books★Ideal opportunity to raise the profile ★ of your department/ and extend the ★ variety of places where your students ★ can learn, but teachers, VLE administrators, ★ IT and library staff need to work together.

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Recent headlines on e-books

e-books for FEBackground to the Project

★ LSC and JISC funded project

★ As a result 2990 e-books are now freely available to all UK FE colleges. If each library had to buy 1 copy of the FE e-books, in print, the cost for each institution would be £116,879.10.

★ Access is for 5 years, FREE of charge

★ By providing FE colleges with a critical mass of relevant e-books we aim to help colleges serve their diverse community of learners.

★ Unlimited, simultaneous user access means that unlike the print world means all students have access to a digital library 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. This provides clear benefits for distance learners, part time students or people who simply prefer not to go to the campus to read material.

★ Many of the titles are available for the first time as an ebook

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Doric Column in a contemporary art installation made from 3000 books, all related to western history, Tom Bendtsen

The titles in the projectBackground to the project

★ The FE community evaluated the titles received and around 80,000 votes were cast. If the titles were not ranked by the community then they were not included in the project. Clear demand for vocational and skills based textbook titles

★ Catered for smaller and specialist colleges

★ This project represents a significant amount of capital funding and is the largest project of its kind

★ Access is provided through the ebrary e-books platform under the terms of the JISC model licence.

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Benefits of ebooksExtending access to your library

Librarians identified the key factors driving interest in e-books as follows:

★24/7 access: the flexibility to access resources anyplace, anytime and anywhere

★Remote access has clear benefits for distance learners, part time students or people who simply prefer not to go to the campus to read material.

★Device independent-access via PC and mobile devices

★Personalisation-users can comment on, ‘tag’ & link to other resources.

★Portability

★Space saving

★Solution to managing short loan collections (including problems of theft and vandalism)

★They address periods of peak demand by providing concurrent access

★They offer functionality not found in hard copy, including search, and cut-and-paste with automatic citation.

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Benefits at Ealing, Hammersmith and West London college:

Enhanced analytical and research skills

Overcoming the barriers of limited books

More self-directive learning

More in depth research integrated into assignments

Enhanced achievement.

Ealing, Hammersmith and West London college by jisc_infonet

3000 books by Mike Moran

What you can dowith this e-stuff

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Search inside & information retrieval

Automatic citation information

Extending access to allWhy are e-books important for inclusion?

•e-books can have disproportionate benefits for learners with disabilities and students working from home

•People with a range of access needs find traditional text books difficult.

•Literacy issues might affect people with low reading ages, people working in a second language or people with specific learning difficulties.

•Books may be physically difficult to manipulate for some users and for others the text size and contrast will present barriers.

• E-Books may allow users to:

★ personalise the text size and colour

★ have the text read aloud by text to speech

★ instant access to referencing tools

★ copy/paste text into notes, reducing the physical demand of typing.

• JISC TechDis has a number of resources to enable staff to create effective, engaging and accessible learning materials for their learners.

• Short video clip on e-books/inclusion - http://tinyurl.com/ebookvideo

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Some People Can't Go to Libraries. ...from New York Public Library

Work with schools : after a book...fromNew York Public Library

Barriers...

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The user perspectiveResponding to user expectations

★In today’s impatient two-click culture, users will gravitate towards the open web if their college or publishers place unnecessary barriers in their way.

★Libraries, IT staff and publishers need to work together to make e-books easily discoverable.

★The library catalogue and VLE are the main routes for discovery for library e-book content, it is essential that accurate metadata MARC records is supplied with e-books and that it is imported.

★There was noticeable confusion by students in focus groups over means of access: in particular confusion between library web pages, the library catalogue and federated searching.

★Libraries need to offer a clearer route to content. Students also showed little real understanding of the distinction between the e-resources provided through their own institution or via the open web.

★Until discovery methods and e-book platforms become really intuitive, colleges will need to continue to provide training to their users.

•There is a multiplicity of e-content, and a multiplicity of ways to get to it and users don’t know how to get to what they want. Libraries have a big challenge in providing clear access routes to e-content. Discovery needs to be made a simple as possible.

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Promoting and embedding e-stuffKey findings from the HE observatory Project:

★ Active promotion leads to higher use. Higher use means happy students, esp. part time students.

★ However the successful incorporation of e‐books into VLEs requires promotion, initial effort in inputting the links etc. and greater dialogue between librarians and teaching staff.

★ Get in touch with ebrary to incorporate your logo, branding etc into the site. Sell your services!

★ Social networking applications

★ Subject specific bookmarks advertising e‐books, putting stickers on the hard copy

★ Dummy books on the shelf to prompt users when all the print copies were on loan.

★ Coffee and croissants mornings

★ Video exemplars

★ Most popular title lists, titles to your colleagues

★ Wobblers

★ Quick start guides

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If you have used e-books from your university library how did you first find out about them?

Colleges need to develop a strategy for raising awareness of all types of e-books and developing academic literacy. Teaching staff should also be encouraged to engage more actively in pointing out to students the range of high quality free and paid for e-book content that is available.

Helping colleges build their collections of e-bookse-select framework agreement

• The project is funded for five years, but the objective is sustainability. This will involve helping FE colleges to grow their collections of e-books.

• You can download and view the usage statistics for your college

• From September JISC Collections will monitor the usage of the e-books, looking at trends across colleges, discipline areas, and titles.

• e-select framework agreement

• In addition to the centrally purchased collections, colleges will be able to locally purchase additional e-book titles through the e-select framework agreement, including newer editions.

• Assessors from FE colleges will evaluate and rank the e-books submitted for inclusion on the following criteria:

• Relevance to qualifications taken in FE

• Demonstrable discounts for FE colleges

• Opportunity for us to shape the provision of e-resources and to go beyond providing handouts to creating a dynamic environment where students can personalise, archive, tag annotate and share content.

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What next?Meeting the demand for e-books

• There are significant gaps between what colleges need and what publishers and aggregators are offering.

• e-books are not cheap, especially when they are currently used as ‘back‐up’ copies or to ease the pressure on the print collection.

• We will continue to negotiate with publishers so that the titles the community needs are made available as e-books.

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• FE Business models study

• We know very little about student purchasing behaviour of textbooks in either print or electronic form nor how willing FE students would be willing to pay for chapter/e-books JISC Collections has commissioned John Cox associates evaluate a range of business models including student purchase.

• More titles

• Good news, JISC has provided funding of 200k to acquire an additional collection of e-books to the collection. As with the current collection, they will be free of charge from May .

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