Consultation
CONSULTATION CLOSED
JISC National E-books Observatory Project
Choosing e-books to support your taught course students
HE Community Consultation
The JISC national e-books observatory project aims to license for 2 YEARS ONLY collections of e-books that are core texts for HE taught course students in the following subject areas:
- Engineering
- Medicine (excluding mental health and nursing)
- Media Studies
- Business and Management
Why? Because it is these core texts that publishers are reluctant to make available online and via the library for fear of losing their valuable print revenues that they get from selling to students. But it is exactly these core texts that libraries and their users WANT access to – it’s a catch 22 situation!
This project aims to stimulate publishers and aggregators into taking that vital step forward to resolve the catch 22 situation.
JISC will fund publishers to make available a selection of their core e-books to ALL UK HE institutions FREE for the duration of the project (2 years). The funding will help publishers manage any risk (any potential loss of print sales) and enable us (JISC, JISC Collections, Librarians, Publishers, Aggregators) to assess the use of the e-books by staff and students to find out what they are doing with e-books and why. These ‘behaviour’ patterns will be studied through a deep log analysis and the information derived from this study will inform promotional strategies and allow us to find out if by making these core texts available online via the library it really does damage publisher sales income. In addition, the data will inform our creation of appropriate and realistic business and licensing models for HE libraries.
Why do we need your help?
We received proposal from publishers and aggregators. Each proposal included a list of e-books, but we need your expertise to identify which e-books are on core reading lists and which will best support your students. In other words, we need to know which e-books are the bread & butter for your taught course students, which e-books are likely to be most in demand so that we can license the best e-books and create a CORE COLLECTION in each subject area.
There are 2 parts to the consultation:
- Your ranking of the e-books that are core texts for your taught course students in the 4 subject areas. Please follow the instructions provided.
- Your feedback about platform functionality, standards compliance etc. This will inform the licensing negotiations. Submit your feedback on these questions using the online form.
Please note that for the ranking part of the consultation it is important that we only receive ONE RESPONSE PER INSTITUTION PER SUBJECT AREA. Therefore a level of coordination is required!
Download all the consultation information as a Word document