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 were licensed for two years; from September 2007 to August 2009 and made freely available to all higher education institutions. 26 of the e-books titles were on the MyiLibrary platform and 10 were on the Ovid platform (see the full list of titles licensed). 127 higher education institutions participated in the project, receiving free access to the 36 course texts e-books.
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 funded the creation of the National E-book Observatory Catalogue Records (NEOCaR). This source of records, hosted at EDINA, allowed 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.
JISC Collections provided a range of information to librarians to help them promote the e-books to their staff and students.
- 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 funded a deep log analysis study. This study started in January 2008 and ran for a full year ending on the 31 December 2008 and provided unique deep log data. This data provided quantitative information about users in the four subject areas, their behaviours and patterns of use. Qualitative survey data was also collected to 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 involved all the UK HE institutions that participated in the project. For further information on the study please see the Deep Log Analysis page.
5. January 2009 to June 2009: Deep log analysis report
The deep log analysis study team analysed all the data and together with JISC Collections provided reports and briefing papers.
6. April 2009 to August 2009: Review of materials licensed and future actions
The e-book licences ended on the 31st August 2009. Discounted prices were agreed for the titles going forward. Institutions purchased the titles that they used.
7. August 2009 – November 2009: Final reports
The final reports for the deep log analysis study (including the user surveys, focus groups, print sales analysis) were completed and reviewed by the JISC e-books working group. The final reports are all available online.
8. October 2009 – February 2010: CIBER work continues
Further analysis of the data collected in the Observatory project is underway. This includes an analysis of the free text fields in the user surveys, an exploration of what the findings of the project mean for the future design of e-books, a look at market segmentation and an analysis of change. Further information on this work is available on the DLA page.