JISC national e-books observatory project

The JISC National E-books Observatory Catalogue Records (NEOCaR)

NEOCaR provides HE librarians with a single download process for the MARC 21 records for all the e-books licensed as part of the National e-book observatory project. To access NEOCaR please visit the NEOCaR page at EDINA.

Why NEOCaR?

At the start of the e-books project, the Project Board identified that there could be a huge amount of duplication of effort in acquiring the MARC records from the publishers, quality assuring them and integrating them into catalogues. To avoid this and to bring further value to a previous JISC funded project (Testbed for the Interoperability of Metadata for E-books – TIME) JISC provided further funding to create NEOCar.

NEOCaR holds all the MARC records for the e-books licensed as part of the project. The records have been checked by Rightscom to see if they hold data in all the required fields. Some records are missing an e-ISBN for reasons outside of our control despite requesting e-ISBNs for all the titles.

To access the MARC 21 records please visit the NEOCaR page at EDINA, and follow the instructions to download the records into your library catalogue. JISC Collections would recommend that all libraries incorporate the MARC 21 records into their catalogues and provide direct links from the catalogue and VLE as it has been shown in several studies that this is essential in raising awareness of the availability of the e-books and encouraging use by students.

Whats happening to NEOCaR now? 

JISC Collections is investigating a number of options to further develop NEOCaR. One of the options being looked at is to ask publishers who have a JISC Collections agreement for e-book collections to place the MARC records for all their e-book titles into NEOCaR, thus creating a central searchable location for quality MARC records. More news about this will be released following the investigation.

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