Overview
1. January 2007: Project Start up
The project commenced at the beginning of January 2007.
- The Project Plan details the aims and objectives of the project, provides background information on why the project was started and includes the project approach, risks and outputs.
2. January 2007 to September 2007: e-books selection and licensing
The first section of the project began by issuing tenders to the e-book community inviting bidders to submit lists of course text e-books that support students in the four subject areas. A total of 11 bids were were received from a mix of publishers and e-book aggregators. 6 bids were successful in moving through to the final stage of marking - the National E-books Observatory consultation. The 6 bids equated to a total of 136 e-books; 7 media studies e-books, 29 engineering e-books, 42 medicine e-books and 58 business and management e-books. Further information and the full tender document are available at: The Course Text E-books ITT
The consultation was crucial in identifying the top ‘most-wanted’ e-books and it could not have been done without the help of the community, so thank you for such a great response. The results from the consultation were discussed at the July Project Board meeting and the selection finalised within the available budget of £600,000 and in light of the online feedback regarding e-book standards and licensing. Further information on the consultation and the documents is available at: The national e-book observatory consultation
- Licensing the e-books
The 36 selected course text e-books have be licensed for two years; from September 2007 to August 2009 and are freely available to all higher education institutions. 26 of the e-books titles are on the MyiLibrary platform and 10 are on the Ovid platform (see the full list of titles licensed). 127 higher education institutions are participating in the project and receiving free access to the 36 course texts online.
3. September 2007 to February 2008: Embedding and promotion
Institutions required time to integrate the MARC records into their catalogues, Virtual Learning Environments (VLEs) and reading lists. This period focused on promotion and embedding.
JISC has funded the creation of the National E-book Observatory Catalogue Records (NEOCaR). This source of records, hosted at EDINA, allows all institutions to download ALL the MARC records for the e-books in the project in one go. Further information on this is available on the NEOCaR pages.
- Workshops
JISC Collections held 13 workshops with 250 librarians from 131 different institutions. The workshops provided an opportunity for JISC Collections to inform librarians of how the final selection of course texts was made, the prices paid, the challenges faced in the licensing and the MARC records. The main focus of the workshops though were to discuss the current and future provision of course text e-books and the role of the library. 90% of the librarians at the workshops believe that it is the role of the library to provide course text e-books to all students and staff free at the point of use and for the library / institution to cover the costs of this! The general feeling was that students expect their course texts to be online and free and that students can not afford to buy their course texts. This of course does not help resolve the business model issue, so in addition to identifying the main challenges and how these may be overcome, the librarians came up with business models that could be trialed. They also discussed their utopias for the future of course text e-book provision and the what needs to happen to see these become a reality. These actions are being taken forward by the JISC e-books working group.
4. January 2008 to December 2008: Deep log analysis
In order to further assess the impacts and the usage of the e-books, JISC Collections has funded a deep log analysis study. This study started in January 2008 and will run for a full year ending on the 31 December 2008 and will provide unique deep log data. This data will provide quantitative information about users in the four subject areas, their behaviours and patterns of use. Qualitative survey data will inform the development of e-books for the taught course user and promotional methods.
An invitation to tender was issued for the Deep Log Analysis and the tender was awarded to CIBER at UCL. The full tender document is available at: The Deep Log Analysis ITT. The Deep Log Analysis Study will involve all UK HE institutions, for further information on what deep log analysis is and how to get involved please see the Deep Log Analysis page.
5. January 2009 to March 2009: Deep log analysis report
The deep log analysis study team will be allowed three months to analyse the results and write the final report
6. April 2009 to August 2009: Review of materials licensed and future actions
The e-book licences end on the 31st August 2009. The period between April 2009 and August 2009 will allow all parties the opportunity to assess the future licensing options in light of the project and to do this in sufficient time before the licences run out.
Project benefits
- Provide all parties with an in-depth understanding of e-books are actually used in teaching and learning. This information will be invaluable to publishers and institutions as it will inform the online creation, format and promotion of core reading materials
- Enable publishers, libraries and aggregators to assess the demand for e-books that support taught course students
- Enable all parties to measure the effect of ‘free at the point’ of use e-books on the buying behaviours of students and on print sales
- Enable libraries to measure the benefits and potential costs of providing e-books to students
- Inform the creation of appropriate and realistic pricing and licensing models
- Raise awareness of e-books throughout the academic community and stimulate the e-books market in a managed environment