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.

ERM-IG now has a new mailing list.

Jason Griffey, In-Coming Chair reports
What is BIGWIG? A working IG interested in social and emerging technologies. We do our work and discussions virtually using all tools possible. We are not a simple discussion group.

Our current structure is as follows:
We have an incoming chair, two co-chairs, and an outgoing chair. One chair is always in movement up and down. This will give the group continuity needed for projects as there will always be a chair with experience in office. We also have a Technical Coordinator who does back end work on the blog and a Volunteer Coordinator who organizes blogging efforts for conferences.

New positions possibly needed:

Do we want to be a formal committee now that we are doing more committee-like work?
Action: Michelle Boule will post committee requirements to the listserv for discussion

Michelle Boule, Co-Chair, reports
Blog Update

Wiki Update
Aaron Dobbs – Can we web committee pages on the wiki?
Action item Michelle: bump up Aaron’s account
Wiki Co-Coordinators needed: Aaron Dobbs and Michelle Boule agree to take this on

Do we want a checklist for what goes on the blog and what goes on the wiki? Shelved for discussion on the listserv

Social Software Showcase
Was a success!
A managed discussion space is the kind of physical space we want. We need to have a good description for the official ALA program. We will discuss speakers at Midwinter. Maybe we could have aMeebo Room wrangler during the f2f portion of the Showcase?

Do we want to try to do back channels for TTT or other LITA Tracks? Forum? Action: Michelle Boule to post this to listserv for discussion at a later date.

Karen Coombs, Co-Chair, reports
Forum, Midwinter, Annual – plans for stuff
The virtual piece to ALA conferences is missing. Karen would like to see us capturing things at Forum. Slides as a flash and with audio feed, audio, interviews, etc. What would the equipment needs be? If we only have audio then people would have to find the slides. Is it better to have both where people can choose either the audio or visual or both? At a minimum we can do the keynotes. Forum will be pilot for this type of reporting.
Action: Karen Coombs start talk on listserv about logistics at Forum

New Officers
Michelle Boule stepping down to be Outgoing Chair
Jason Griffey will step up to be Co-Chair
Karen Coombs continues as Co-Chair
Jonathan Blackburn was voted in as the new incoming chair and will be stepping down as Volunteer Coordinator.
Tiffany Smith new Volunteer Coordinator
Kevin Clarke will continue Technology Coordinator
David Lee King – Podcast Coordinator (maybe with the podcasts we will need co-wranglers?)

There will be opportunities for volunteering for all the BIGWIG projects as the dates for conferences get closer. If you would like to participate in the discussion or volunteer, join our listserv.

Action: Michelle Boule send Tiffany Google doc for volunteer stuff and work with Jonathan to institutionalize our volunteer wrangling information