Firday June 22, 2007
LITA ERM Interest Group did a managed discussion on e-books. Ted Koppel, Verde ERM Product Manager (ExLibris) gave the talk. (Note: Verde just starts working on e-books management system.) His function in this talk was basically asking questions and raising awareness on e-books management.
Koppel suggested that we start thinking about e-books management now. Even though many libraries are just getting used to e-journals management and might still learning the ins and outs of the licensing management stuff, many of these libraries are already delivering e-books.
Start thinking on usage scenarios such as use for e-learning, e-reserve, and e-books as e-textbooks. Other e-books scenario are possible: single use circulation, institutional repositories, archiving and preservation especially in the wake of the digitization projects from Google and other commercial companies.
There are several functional areas that a library needs to consider, ask, or make decisions:
Acquiring e-books commercially
- Does the supplier offer a collection management tool?
- Does the supplier provide metadata or cataloging tool?
- What is the role of licenses and permissions and how do we manage those into the data.
- How does the industry deal with the open access model as well as the so-called free e-books such as government documents?
Acquiring or creating e-books locally
- what departments within the institution that produce the e-books, who manages the collections, who does the collection development
- e-books only or other digital materials as well?
- where is the metadata coming from for the locally created material?
- Granularity: how is the ERM system used to managed the collection?
- Use/copyright restrictions, licensing/contracts for the locally produced e-books.
Description
- What description/identifier should we use (Dublin Core, MARC, etc.)
- What Unified Resource Identification (URI) that is used?
- Shall records added to OPAC or do we need to keep them separately?
- Differences in indexing and access points.
- Use publisher’s search platform or should we develop it locally to our own need?
Discovering e-books
- At the discovery level, are e-books different than their physical version?
- What kind of search mechanism is the one and how the indexes are built? Do we need indexes?
- Which thesauri to use? Should it be LCHS or our own local practices?
- Combining e-book search results with other results, presumably related material?
- Do we need to FRBRized the result?
- Can we embed e-books search in other platform such as a course management system?
- Does it offer relevance ranking result?
- User tagging?
- Rules for use – who tells the users and how? When ERM stops and DRM kicks in?
- ‘Unlimited access’ vs. charge out this copy model?
- Pay per view or other use model?
- Prerequisite requirements for delivery (specific browser, computer OS, etc.)
- Granularity
- deep links to title/chapter/page within an e-book?
- Indexing and retrieval depth: chapter? pages? paragraph?
- Resource sharing system, is it possible?
e-books management
- Is e-books management different than e-journals?
- Has the role of Collection Management changed?
- Staff role?
- License, usage, DRM?
- Budget, support, maintenance?
Koppel summarized that:
- e-books are still in their infancy.
- e-books usage will follow, as will users expectations.
- our experience with managing e-journals will make the move to managing e-books easier.
- but there is still much to learn.
There were several questions, discussions, and updates after the talk. A representative from Overdrive talked about their product and mentioned International Digital Publishing Forum, formerly the Open e-book Forum (OeBF). He also mentioned that Adobe just released a free Adobe Digital Edition 1.0 , for Windows and MacOS (linux version coming soon). This is a rich internet application (RIA), Flash-based. The software can also open and read PDF docs.
Several ERM members presented reports from several conferences they went to: NASIG, ACRL, and ER&L. They participated at several focus groups discussing various issues on ERM:
- ERM implementation and workflow planning space for discussion/online community for sharing best practices
- ERM systems that come with some default settings
- staffing for e-resources
- training and appropriate staff levels
- standardized licenses from publisher that they can upload to ERM
- no standards for publishing e-data
- ERM vendors to provide consultation services for ERM implementation
Other tidbits mentioned:
- Blog for ER&L
- Victoria Reich from LOCKSS encourages libraries to use e-books because we can utilize preservation initiatives like LOCKSS to have permanent archive of our e-book collections.
- ONIX standards for holdings data:
- SOH (Serials Online Holdings) format v.1.1
- SRN (Serials Release Notification) User Guide is available
- OPLE – open source tool for ONIX for Serials
One attendee wondered if there’s a possiblity for direct communication mechanism between publishers and libraries, as well as communication between publishers and agents, especially in term of licensing. Coincidently, my co-worker just reported that NISO has a working group called SERU (Shared e-Resource Understanding) that just published a draft on common understanding between libraries and publishers. This draft is aimed for publishers and libraries that prefer to simplify (or even remove the need of) journal licenses.