The UL and ebooks: focus on … Oxford Scholarship Online

In a previous post, I wrote about the UL’s evidence-based acquisition scheme (EBA) with De Gruyter and its associated publishers, which has been running since 2016. This is not the UL’s only evidence-based plan: since the summer of 2015, we have had an EBA with Oxford Scholarship Online.

Oxford Scholarship Online is Oxford University Press’s ebook platform, and it includes thousands of academic monographs, including both brand-new titles and many works from OUP’s extensive backlist. They are grouped into subject collections, and the following areas are included in the UL’s EBA:

• Business and Management
• Classical Studies
• Economics and Finance
• History
• Linguistics
• Literature
• Music
• Philosophy
• Political Science
• Religion
• Sociology

As with the De Gruyter EBA, the scheme works on an annual basis: the UL pays a sum of money upfront, and at the end of the twelve-month period, we purchase a selection of ebooks outright (aided by the usage statistics which OUP supply). This selection is usually done in consultation with faculty and departmental librarians, who can request the purchase of those titles which are particularly relevant for their users.

The scheme offers many advantages. The ebooks come without any restrictions on usage (they are DRM-free, so there is unlimited concurrency and downloading permitted); and with new titles being added on a monthly basis, it is frequently the case that an ebook will be online and accessible some time before the print can be made available to readers. We are generally able to buy around 150 ebooks outright each year, but as it is an ongoing scheme, we do not lose access to any titles. The usage is an interesting mix: in 2018-19, the most popular title was a publication from 2017 (The Grammar of Messianism), but in fifth place was a work which is over twenty years old (Revenge Tragedy, originally published in 1996).

A selection of titles selected for perpetual purchase in 2019 can be seen below.

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• Borrowed Words: A History of Loanwords in English
• Child Emperor Rule in the Late Roman West, AD 367-455
• Colonial Counterpoint: Music in Early Modern Manila
• The Economic Development of Latin America Since Independence
• God’s Own Party: The Making of the Christian Right
• Iris Murdoch, Philosopher
• London is the Place for Me: Black Britons, Citizenship, and the Politics of Race
• New Work on Speech Acts
• The Physiology of Sexist and Racist Oppression
• Practical Tortoise Raising: And Other Philosophical Essays
• The Sacred Home in Renaissance Italy
• Sacrifice and Modern War Literature: from the Battle of Waterloo to the War on Terror
• Shaping a Muslim State: The World of a Mid-Eighth-Century Egyptian Official
• Small Dictionaries and Curiosity: Lexicography and Fieldwork in Post-Medieval Europe
• Theologically Engaged Anthropology
• Victorian Afterlives: The Shaping of Influence in Nineteenth-Century Literature

Rebecca Gower (Collections and Academic Liaison)

The UL and ebooks: Focus on … the De Gruyter EBA

Last time, I wrote about the UL’s ongoing Ebook Central DDA (demand-driven acquisition) scheme, which makes thousands of ebooks available to users without necessarily purchasing them. Another way in which we open up content to our readers is via evidence-based acquisition (EBA) schemes. These work in a slightly different way, and the details will vary depending on the supplier with whom you set up the EBA, but the basic process is this:

• The library pays a deposit;
• The supplier/publisher opens up access to an agreed package of ebooks (with any new titles being added automatically as they are released);
• At the end of an agreed period of time, the supplier provides the library with a usage report, and the library purchases outright a selection of titles up to the value of the deposit paid at the start.

From a librarian perspective, EBAs have many advantages: you know exactly how much money you will be spending (unlike with DDA schemes, where expenditure can be hard to predict); you generally get DRM-free access to the ebooks included in the scheme (i.e. there are no restrictions on the numbers of concurrent users, and books can be downloaded in full and kept in perpetuity by users); and you can then make purchases based on usage, with clear evidence to back you up. (Though, of course, you have to take into consideration that there may be titles whose lower usage is down to the fact that they are only published during the period of the EBA, rather than being available throughout.) Moreover, library users have access to many more ebooks for the duration of the scheme than the library ultimately ends up buying.

The UL has had an ongoing EBA with De Gruyter since 2016. De Gruyter are a German-based academic publisher who publish in the humanities, social sciences, STM and law, with particular strengths in areas such as linguistics and medieval studies. The EBA is predominantly made up of ebooks in German and English (with a few titles in other European languages), and as well as De Gruyter and its various imprints (e.g. Birkhäuser, which releases many architecture titles), it has the added bonus of including the outputs of a number of “partner presses”, such as Harvard University Press and Transcript Verlag. This means that an enormous range of material is made available to users—at present, there are roughly 58,000 titles in the scheme, and more are in the pipeline.

As I said with reference to Ebook Central, we’re very grateful for the support of the ebooks@cambridge team, who load new De Gruyter records every month, and help in myriad other ways—their expertise is much appreciated!

In total, we have acquired over 2,300 titles since the scheme began, and here are just a handful of our English-language purchases:

Architecture in northern landscapes

Darwin, dharma, and the divine

Wordplay and powerplay in Latin poetry

Art of veiled speech

Dictionary of English rhyming slangs

William Langland’s Piers Plowman

Handbook of medieval culture

Global cinematic cities

What is populism

• Architecture in northern landscapes
• The art of veiled speech: self-censorship from Aristophanes to Hobbes
• Darwin, dharma, and the divine: evolutionary theory and religion in modern Japan
• A dictionary of English rhyming slangs
• Global cinematic cities: new landscapes of film and media
• Handbook of medieval culture
• What is populism?
• William Langland’s Piers Plowman, the C version: a verse translation
• Wordplay and powerplay in Latin poetry

Rebecca Gower (Collections and Academic Liaison)

Science and Engineering coursebooks from CUP

All the coursebooks in the following 5 subjects are now accessible for University of Cambridge staff and students on Cambridge Books Online and its companion platform University Publishing Online.

Astronomy

Chemistry

Earth & Environmental Sciences

Physics

Statistics and Probability

These coursebooks complement the available Cambridge University Press monographs across all subjects, and the Life Sciences coursebooks which were added back in December 2014.

The titles are searchable in LibrarySearch and are available on and off campus (with a Raven username and password).

As new titles are published they will also be made available. Access to these collections will remain until the end of June 2015 in the first instance.

 

Please let us know what you think about CUP ebooks by emailing the ebooks@cambridge team on ebooks@lib.cam.ac.uk.

          

CUP Life Sciences coursebooks now available

All the Life Sciences coursebook titles on Cambridge Books Online (CBO) and its companion platform University Publishing Online (UPO) are now accessible for University of Cambridge staff and students. This complements the access already available to all CUP monographs on CBO and UPO.

The titles are searchable in LibrarySearch and are available on and off campus (with a Raven username and password).

As new titles are published to the Life Sciences coursebooks collection they will also be added. Titles relevant for subjects including Anthropology, Earth and Environmental Sciences, Mathematics, Medicine, Philosophy, Physics, and Psychology are also included in this collection.

Access to this collection will remain until the end of June 2015 in the first instance.

Please send any comments and queries to the ebooks team on ebooks@lib.cam.ac.uk.