Now, Laura Wrubel from University of Maryland, talking about E-books in a Consortial Setting

Laura listing a number of e-book evaluation criteria. A wide range of criteria from availability to OpenURL compliance.

After negotiating a number of deals with a variety of vendors, they found that there wasn’t widespread uptake of the deals in the consortium – so why not? Laura lists a number of challenges:

• Building broad interest around content or platform
• No shared pool of funds in the consortium
• Complicated pricing models
• Limited cost savings
• Lack of shared access (i.e. no access to what other members of the consortium have bought – which would happen in the print environment via interlibrary loan)
• Licensing issues

Laura noting that they have had some success negotiating limited shared access deals. Laura also upbeat about the current models of e-book access changing as libraries work with the vendors to understand the best models for both sides.

Laura outlining the more successful scenarios:

• Central pot of money
• Collaboration on content selection
• Shared access to same set of content

Laura saying that at the consortial level they haven’t managed to ‘mainstream’ e-book workflows, although individual libraries within the consortium have done this, ordering books on a title-by-title basis from their usual vendors.

At Maryland, the catalogue is still the ‘main’ access route for library resources. Currently they get MARC records from the e-book vendors, but they are looking at other possibilities (e.g. OCLC)

Laura noting that e-book identifiers (i.e. ISBN) is much less consistent than e-journal identifiers. Whereas journals may have one ISSN and one eISSN (in generally) – there can be many different ISBNs associated with a single ‘work’ for books.

Maryland use a link resolver (SFX) for e-journals, but there is much less representation of e-books in the Knowledgebase. At the moment they pull the URL out from the 856 field in the catalogue to display in the resolver menu based on the campus the user is on (although I think the problem with this is that it only works when you click through to the link resolver from the OPAC – or at least where you can match the ISBN – back to the problem above)

Laura saying that at the moment ‘ebooks’ are relatively well defined but that won’t remain true (I don’t agree – they aren’t well defined – see my previous post on this!)

Laura says we need multiple routes of access to our e-books collections.

To sum up Laura says we:

• Need consistent consortial models
• Need to bring licensed e-book content into mainstream and integrate with other sites (including course manage systems, search engines etc.)