JISC E-books UK Roadshow

JISC E-books UK Roadshow

JISC National E-books Observatory Project
JISC E-books UK Roadshow JISC National E-books Observatory Project Digital Library Executive Briefing Caren Milloy E-books Project Manager / Senior Collections Manager JISC Collections Hello. Work at JISC Collections that licensing online content for HE and FE as the Senior Collections Manager however for over a year I have been managing this project. Thank you for inviting me to speak this evening. Chris has asked me to pick specific bits of the project to talk about today so I will not be presenting on all angles, rather a selection of information about the JISC national e-books observatory project.

Agenda Background to the project Aims Key Challenges & issues Deep Log Analysis Study Findings so far Questions

A vision for e-books The UK education community will have access to quality e-book content that is of high relevance to teaching, learning and research across the broadest range of subject areas. Flexible business and licensing models will support a diversity of needs, allowing users to do what they want when they want and how they want for education purposes. All e-books will be easily discoverable and consistent standards will allow all content to be fully integrated into library, learning and research environments. E-Books Working Group 2007 The UK Academic Vision and the role of JISC Collections Well it all started with a vision that was created last year by the JISC Collections e-books working group which consists of UK librarians who are experts in e-book and who advise JISC Collections in the licensing of e-books. So what is the vision? That e-books that are highly relevant to student study will be available, that there will be flexible business model, and licensing models that allow users to use the e-books according to their needs and that all these e-books will be easy to find and will meet the required standards to ensure interoperability and integration.

Textbooks wanted There is a demand for core reading list e-books in my institution but these are not being made available and when I ask publishers why they say that there is no evidence of the demand and thus they are reluctant to make these e-books available. But if they don’t make the core titles available online then users are not as interested and therefore the level of demand seems low. In terms of content, what the e-books working group is talking about here is those e-books that are currently not being made available by publishers – textbooks, recommended reading, books on reading lists….all the book that bring in high revenues for publishers due to student sales. Currently we are in a catch 22 situation because as these e-books are not available it is hard for libraries to demonstrate demand and therefore the publishers do not see enough potential revenue to risk their established print sales streams from students.

Why the project? Different selling chain What business models? What licensing models? Not sure what e-books are available Who should take the lead? And it is understandable that publishers don’t want to risk putting their core textbooks online and sell them through the library because Libraries represent a completely different route to market for e-book publishers and the book selling chain changes quite dramatically. Currently no one knows what will be the most appropriate models as there is just not enough evidence of exactly how students will use e-books if they are made freely available through the library. This is why publishers' have been slow to make their core textbooks available online, but to move the market forward and to take the firsr steps towards achiving the Vision, someone had to take the lead and gather this evidence. The e-books working group commission therefore commisioned A Feasibility Study on the Acquisition of E-books in Higher Education and the role of the JISC. A feasibility study on the acquisition of e-books by HE libraries and the role of JISC The study looked at the acquisition of TEXTBOOKS by HE libraries and explored what the role of the JISC might be in a market that has traditionally sold direct to the user.

Why UK higher education has not bought more e-books
JISC E-books UK Roadshow Why UK higher education has not bought more e-books E-book pricing models are not satisfactory (64%) There is too little choice of e-book titles (62%) E-book access models are not satisfactory (53%) We are waiting for the market to settle down (33%) We are waiting for JISC Collections to offer better e-book deals (30%) E-books are too expensive (28%) I do not know what is available (18%) There is no demand for e-books here (13%) Affiliated/ external users are not allowed access (11%) The technology is too complicated (8%) Yes 68% No 32% If there is pressure, where is that coming from? Librarians (54%) Students (38%) Teachers (27%) Management (23%) Researchers (9%)

A feasibility study Ignorance in the HE sector of what e-books are available Low awareness within HEIs of the value and relevance of e-books Poor understanding by library staff and publishers of each others needs Complexity of access routes to aggregators or publishers platforms Too few e-books are available Available e-books are not up to date or relevant to UK users Pricing models are not appropriate Publishers are not making the right textbooks electronically available on the right terms

Aims Well it all took a lot of discussion and careful preparation!

Project Aims license collections of e-books that are highly relevant to UK higher education taught course students in four discipline areas: Business and Management studies Engineering Medicine (not mental health or nursing) Media Studies evaluate the use of the e-books through deep log analysis and to asses the impact of the ‘free at the point of use’ e-books upon publishers, aggregators and libraries achieve a high level of participation in the project by making the e-books available on the bidders own platform (where appropriate) and on a variety of e-book aggregator platforms. Higher education institutions will thus have the option to access the e-books on platforms they already use and which are familiar to their users. transfer knowledge acquired in the project to publishers, aggregators and libraries to help stimulate an e-books market that has appropriate business and licensing models There are three original aims of the project: The project will evaluate the use of the e-books through deep log analysis. The deep log data will provide quantitative information about user behaviours and patterns of use. This will be supplemented by qualitative data from user surveys to explain the patterns of use. Thus we will be able to find out not only the who what when and where but why users did what they did. This data will be used to inform future strategies on the promotion and design of e-books and to asses the impact of ‘free at the point of use’ e-books upon publishers, aggregators and libraries. To share knowledge

Asked for…. Invitation to Tender (ITT) issued Most recent edition post 2000 UK focused / relevant to courses Available on all platforms with no extra fees Compliance with JISC Model Licence Compliance with JISC information environment standards Print sales MARC records Submission into Turnitin We went through European procurement and issued an invitation to tender to publishers and aggregators. The tender asked for core reading list e-books, latest editions, post 2000, print sales and the fee they would charge for a two year licence taking into consideration the data they would receive back from the deep log analysis. I knew that I would have to persuade some publishers even though we were offering to pay them a fee for the e-books that were selected and licensed to help mitigate risks in revenue loss I held a briefing event that was attended by over 20 publishers and aggregators. The questions received primarily revolved around money, for example, would JISC Collections fund the digitisation of texts? (NO), would JISC be involved in the business arrangements between the publishers and the aggregator? (NO), would JISC purchase the titles at the end of the project (NO) and who would manage the relationships with the bookshops? (Not JISC). At the end of the event I felt that we had got the message across that the project involves collaboration and some risks, but that there were significant advantages to taking part. At UKSG in April I rallied the publishers / aggregators. We received 11 bids which was very pleasing, however after reading some of them I felt frustrated that they were not engaging with the spirit of the project and were not taking the bull by the horns and taking this opportunity to take a chance. I felt that their reluctance to embrace the project was in fact simply delaying an inevitable change, especially when print sales are shown to be declining year upon year….But not all was lost; some of bids met the requirements and embraced the chance to experiment in a safe environment. Very encouraging, very wise! So what did I find out? The one thing that really struck me from all the conversations I had with publishers was that there was no single e-books department responsible for putting the bid together, rather several departments had to be consulted; textbooks, sales, those in charge of platforms, finance, rights and so on. Back in 2005, the JISC e-books working group held a number of meetings with publishers who said that they did not yet have an e-books strategy as they were unsure of the market. Two years later and I sensed that although progress had been made, they were still dipping their toes in the water and waiting for someone else to dive in the deep end before them.

Got back…. Mix of publishers and e-book aggregators
Poor – Medium quality of proposals Lack of thought and effort? Must take whole collection! Conditions on the pricing Lack of compliance with model licence no copying, printing, pasting, incorporation into VLE Limit on number of concurrent users Lack of compliance with technical standards No shibboleth, deep linking, z39.50 Silent on COUNTER, MARC records Proprietary systems and software for printing, viewing, reference

Consultation Consultation included 136 titles at total value of £2.08 million!!! Prioritise titles against reading lists etc Identify crucial parts of licence What we found…. All libraries want MARC 21 records & in central location Standards: Open URL, COUNTER compliancy, Z39.50, compliance with the Disability Discrimination Act Term and condition: Allow to print, copy and save, and provide links direct from the VLE Deposit in the ‘turnitin’ database, for plagiarism detection No preferred platform at the moment – libraries are still experimenting online consultation regarding the licensing. aspects and complete the online survey with their thoughts about standards, licensing etc. What we found out was that libraries really need MARC records and they want them all in one place That standards for e-books are essential That the ability to actually use an e-book in the ways that students and staff need to is very important That plagiarism is high on the agenda That they don’t have preffered platforms as they are experiementing and not all the books they want are on the same platform anyway! The consultation helped us to narrow down the selection and I presented a number of scenarios to the board that I will show you shortly.

Key challenges & issues
JISC E-books UK Roadshow Key challenges & issues

Selection v Budget Bidder Total cost of Bid No. of e-books in bid Average cost per title (inc.VAT) 1 £141,888.00 21 £6,756.57 2 £352,500.00 30 £11,750.00 3 £49,965.70 7 £7,137.96 4 £23,206.25 12 £1,933.85 5 £83,718.75 100 £837.19 6 £113,074.95 £9,422.91 £135,000.45 11 £12,272.77 8 £4,516,060.80 96 £47,042.30 9 £399,972.57 4496 £88.96 The last challenge was the selection of the titles within the budget available. This shows you the pricing of the individual e-books by the bidders varied quite dramatically, possibly due to the attitude of some bidders. However the table does not represent the true costs, for example, bidder 9 may seem very reasonable but a requirement of their bid was that 16 copies of each e-book had to be purchased so in actual fact the real cost would be much higher. Another example was that Bidder 2 would not let the e-books be individually chosen and required the whole collection to be purchased which would take half the budget in one fell swoop.

decisions… The total collective value of the 136 e-books included in selected bids was £2.08 million excluding VAT. There were 7 media studies e-books included in the consultation at a total of £73,266. There were 58 business and management studies e-books included. The cost of just the top 5 business and management e-books was over £362,000. In engineering there were 29 e-books in the consultation and the cost of the top 7 was £201,477. However, if you removed one title that was over £60k, 18 e-books could be purchased for £200,688. The medicine area included 42 e-books, 30 of which cost £300k and the others cost £96,204. The total collective value of the 136 e-books included in consultation was £2.08 million excluding VAT. The budget available was £600,000. The consultation results helped to prioritise the final selection of e-books, but this was not easy either as the board had to consider several issues such as should they divide the £600k evenly between the subject areas, should very high cost titles be included as they were popular even though it would mean that they would only be able to purchase a smaller number of titles and how would this impact on creating a core collection? If you look at this slide you can see that the pricing by subject differed with the business and management titles as the most expensive – with only 5 titles costing over half the budget. The final selection of titles was smaller than we had initially hoped, but they were the highest ranked titles and it must not forgotten that that all the titles are unlimited simultaneous access with terms and conditions of use that are not normally allowed. In addition, the data that we get back from these titles, we hope will inform and define the future of e-books in our libraries.

MARC records National E-books Observatory Catalogue Records (NEOCaR) Central location Cataloguing experts provided essential list Tested & Quality assured records Received inaccurate information in all 36 records!!! No ISBNs for e-books No adopted policy – this has to change quickly! Publishers see ISBNs in terms of distribution / selling Librarians see ISBNs in terms of finding / buying The tender clearly stated that MARC 21 records would be required for all e-books licensed. JISC provided further funding for the National E-books Observatory Catalogue records project to be set up to quality assure the records received from the successful bidders. In order to ensure that the records received contained the correct data as required by librarians a list of essential, important and desirable fields was created in consultation with cataloguing experts with HE libraries and included in the final licences. The slow progress with the records caused a large time delay in getting the records out to institutions. This was due to inaccurate records being provided, with data missing or the wrong data included and missing e-books ISBNs. The first of the two issues simply required effort by the parties involved, however the e-book ISBN issue was and continues to be problematic. It appears that there is a huge diversity in methods and practice for e-books ISBNs with some publishers creating them, some not, some creating their own type of ISBNs that are not really ISBNs! Unless resolved, the lack of standards in this area will cause massive problems for librarians as more and more e-books become available and the supply chain becomes integrated with print.

The Final Selection Media studies: 7 e-books, 6 published by Taylor and Francis and one by Palgrave, all available on the MyiLibrary platform Medical: 10 e-books all published by Lippincott Williams & Wilkins, all available on the platform Business and Management studies: 5 e-books published by Palgrave and Pearson, all available on the MyiLibrary platform Engineering: 14 e-books published by Elsevier, Thomas Telford and Cambridge University Press, all available on the MyiLibrary platform 36 e-books in total!

Project participation
JISC E-books UK Roadshow Project participation MyiLibrary 76% Ovid 47% So where are we now? Since the launch of the e-book collections, we have had 127 HE institutions subscribe to the MyiLibrary collection, that’s 74 % of all UK HE institutions and we have had 80 HE institutions subscribe to the Wolters Kluwer Ovid collection which is 46% of all HE. These numbers are excellent, even better than we expected. We received around 70 institutional responses to the consultation so we were expecting a number similar to that. What is interesting is that institutions that we did not expect to sign up as they do not have courses in business, medicine, media studies or engineering have done so. This shows just how keen everyone is to understand how their users are finding, evaluating and using e-books through the DLA Study which is running for the whole of this year.

Deep Log Analysis Study
JISC E-books UK Roadshow Deep Log Analysis Study January 2008 – March 2009 Finding about how users use e-books to inform business models and licensing models One of the key objectives and what I think is the really interesting part of the project is the Deep Log Analysis Study.

Deep Log Analysis Sampling the logs Benchmarking data collection user survey & institutional survey Case Studies focus groups with academics, students, librarians Analysis of raw server log data Analysis of impact on learning & traditional print sales!!! Analysis of promotional methods, business and licensing methods Benchmarking Survey Final report and recommendations So the process for a year is that we Sampling the logs Benchmarking data collection user survey & institutional survey Case Studies focus groups with academics, students, librarians Analysis of raw server log data Analysis of impact on learning & traditional print sales Analysis of promotional methods, business and licensing methods Benchmarking Survey Final report and recommendations

JISC E-books UK Roadshow JISC E-books UK Roadshow and the User Survey
Findings so far JISC E-books UK Roadshow and the User Survey So what have we found out so far?

12 workshops 250 librarians from 131 institutions Well in Jan and Feb I ran 12 workshops around the UK Each workshop invited discussions around business and licensing models and the drivers required to reach a future utopia in e-textbook provision. Well attended

Librarians and their views
JISC E-books UK Roadshow Librarians and their views I believe that my library should cover the costs to provide students with access to their course texts online, free at the point of use. 90% of librarians agreed with this statement I believe that my library should provide students with access to their course texts online, but that the costs should be shared between the library, the department and the student. 7% of librarians agreed with this statement I believe that my library should provide students with access to their course texts online, but that the library should not have to pay and students should be charged. 3% of librarians agreed with this statement At the workshops the librarians had to pick a corner that they felt represented their view of the library in the future of e-textbooks….. The result of this is the creation of a new strand of business model experiments….. Several interesting business and licensing models were discussed at the workshops, some of which are already being used by aggregators and publishers. Even though one of the core aims of the national e-books observatory project is to gather an evidence base to inform future business and licensing models, it does not prevent us from exploring the pros and cons of different models. For example, if the national e-books observatory project highlights that students simply dip in and out and spend very little time in an e-book, then a model based on usage or time might be appropriate and affordable for institutions. How each pricing model is administered and managed has major implications on the institution and we may want to consider how a library might manage the workflows and processes involved.

User Survey Initial benchmark against which to measure changes as the JISC national e-books observatory project progresses. The survey was circulated to the 127 HE institutions participating in the project and gathered information on current user awareness, perceptions and attitudes towards e-books. Over 20,000 responses were received to the survey making it one of the largest e-book surveys ever undertaken. That was what the librarians thought….we also asked the users in the survey……

Findings 60% of respondents already use e-books 45.8% find e-books through their library, 42.6% find them free on the internet 62.6% of students read the e-book from the screen, 6% printed it out and 30% did a bit of both 38.6% user spend more than 20 minutes reading online 54.7% dip in and out of the e-books, 8% read a whole chapter, 5.8% read the book Over 40% users access their library from home, preferring the virtual route 75.9% of staff were aware of the e-books licensed as part of the JISC project Students are borrowing books from friends and through the library more frequently than purchasing them – 40% as opposed to 3% (JISC titles only) Here are some of the headline findings 60% of respondents use e-books showing that it is not an immature market anymore. The percentages are quite equal amongst full time, part time and staff. 45.8% find e-books through their library, 42.6% find them free on the internet. This is an issue about branding for libraries also. 62.6% of students read the e-book from the screen, 6% printed it out and 30% did a bit of both. This is very interesting and has implications for future licensing models and how we perceive our users. Are we getting more and more accustomed to reading online. I know I am. 38.6% students spend more than 20 minutes reading online, staff spend minutes reading from the screen in one session. 54.7% dip in and out of the e-books, 8% read a whole chapter, 5.8% read the book, this fits with the behaviour in the Google Generation report Over 40% users access their library from home, preferring the virtual route 75.9% of staff were aware of the e-books licensed as part of the JISC project Students are borrowing books from friends and through the library more frequently than purchasing them – 40% as opposed to 3%. Interesting as we can see print sales declining anyway.

Questions? www.jiscebooksproject.org c.milloy@jisc.ac.uk
Thank You! Questions?

JISC E-books UK Roadshow

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