On Tuesday 4th July we gathered together for our first in-person Ebooks Open Meeting since 2019! Many thanks to everyone who joined us in the English Faculty, including the vocal wren outside the window who we can only assume had some big things to say about ebooks.
Other big things on the agenda were metadata, usage data and subscriptions, and supporting open access (OA) monographs. Jo Milton (Medical Library Manager and Chair of the Ebooks Advisory Group) kicked off proceedings with an introductory welcome, and then we were straight into the presentations.
Emily Perdue and Suz Edgar (Ebooks Assistants) talked about updates in the work of the ebooks team. At last year’s meeting, the team had reflected on the increased levels of title-by-title purchasing, which are now starting to drop off a little although remaining higher than pre-pandemic levels. Although title-by-title purchasing is down, there is still a lot going on!
Ebook Collections Metadata (Emily Perdue)
Emily is responsible for the big metadata projects within the team. The ebooks team generally keeps subscription and collection records up-to-date either by loading MARC files received from publishers or through Alma’s Community Zone, but there is still a lot of time-consuming (and vital) work to be done maintaining the quality of these records and dealing with any changes in our collection access. Emily noted that often Community Zone records will display inaccurate metadata or linking, which can be edited locally by the ebooks team but must also be reported to Ex Libris so that it can be fixed centrally.
Emily also talked about the annual De Gruyter selection process. The UL subscribes to De Gruyter’s popular SSH EBA (Evidence Based Acquisition) scheme from its English and German budgets; the subscription provides Cambridge with access to a large number of ebooks from selected partner presses, and every year Cambridge selects ebooks to retain permanently drawing largely on usage reports. Every year annual collections are created in Alma for the selected De Gruyter ebooks, which means that Emily checks, edits and moves hundreds upon hundreds of records into the new collections. (Emily recently wrote a blog post about metadata work on De Gruyter STEMM collections.) Another job has involved creating local records for the PEPweb ebook collection. The Community Zone e-collection had been flighty, appearing one moment and vanishing the next, so Emily set about creating a sturdy local collection that will stay in place and ensure that students and researchers can reliably find what they need in iDiscover.
Usage data and subscriptions (Suz Edgar)
Suz spoke a bit about subscription usage data. The ebooks team regularly compiles usage data for all ebook platforms, including the data that we use to monitor the value of Cambridge’s annual ebook subscriptions. She looked first at two subject-specific subscriptions, Law Trove and Clinical Key, which are popular textbook collections with our Law and Medical/Pre-Medical students respectively, in particular Law Trove which grows in popularity every year.
A trickier piece of work has been analysis of the two big interdisciplinary ebook subscription collections, ProQuest Academic Complete (hosted on Ebook Central) and EBSCO Academic Worldwide (hosted on EBSCOhost). Considerations include: how to measure comparative usage when there is content overlap between the collections and Ebook Central links have an alphabetical advantage in iDiscover; the quality of publisher content in each collection; the usability of the ebook platforms, and analysing reading list use (Leganto, Moodle, etc.).
OA monographs and the UL: a brief history, and things to consider (Rebecca Gower)
Rebecca Gower (English Collections and Academic Liaison Librarian) and Jayne Kelly (Ebook Collections Manager) then spoke to the group about OA monographs.
Jayne and Rebecca are members of a Cambridge working group on OA monographs. Although Cambridge has dipped its toe in the waters of OA book publishing since 2014, it is from 2020 onwards that we have proactively sought to increase our support for publishing initiatives such as Central European Press’ Opening the Future and MIT Press’ Direct to Open.
Rebecca highlighted the need for a dedicated OA fund. She also addressed the various factors to consider when deciding on which OA initiatives to support, such as subject coverage, ethical and accessibility considerations, the availability of good metadata and whether or not the collection can stand on its own as something we would wish to buy, regardless of its OA status.
CUL’s support for OA Service Providers along with Metadata insights (Jayne Kelly)
Jayne took to the floor to talk about how Cambridge has recently supported OA service providers. In 2022-23, Cambridge signed up to support the following providers for the next three years:
- Open Book Collective: Service Providers Package – supports OAPEN (Open Access Publishing in European Networks), DOAB (Directory of Open Access Books) and Thoth in their work to improve the discoverability and usability of OA books
- OASPA (Open Access Scholarly Publishing Association) – a network engaged in promoting and enabling OA as the primary model for scholarly outputs.
Finally, Jayne talked us through the thorny issue of OA metadata. Many of our OA ebook records are created and managed through the Community Zone, and there is inconsistency in both the quality of the records and how long they take to appear in the catalogue.
Metadata issues affect more than just catalogue records; incomplete tagging of OA ebooks on supplier websites can also result in librarians accidentally purchasing content that is already openly available. The DOAB-OAPEN Library Working Group is looking at tackling these issues, but this underlines the importance of sustainably funding not only OA publishing models but the infrastructure that makes these OA collections discoverable, usable, accessible, and truly open.
Browns Books (Sue May, Browns Books)
Finally, Sue May talked to the group about recent developments at Browns Books. (Our rep Sally Allen was unable to make the meeting, so Sue kindly agreed to step in.) Browns Books is a major print and ebook supplier for Cambridge. Their ebooks platform VLeBooks hosts a range of academic monographs and textbooks, as well as trade books that are often not available from other library ebook vendors.
Sue addressed recent feedback on the VLeBooks platform, which had been received following a College library user survey and had provided some interesting insights. There was negative feedback on Adobe Digital Editions (the offline reader for DRM-protected ebooks) and reports of the online reader timing out. Sue noted that Browns is currently investigating alternative offline readers to Adobe Digital Editions and that reading ebooks in a browser should not sign you out after a short period of time, although a user may find that they are signed out if they are using a mobile device and then move between applications within the device.
Sue also spoke about upcoming developments at Browns Books: new features for library administrators, a bespoke DDA (Demand Driven Acquisition) scheme, and future improvements in platform functionality, including a new app, advanced searching, and (now live!) the ability for readers to choose between PDF or ePub formats where both formats are available. (Emily recently wrote a blog post on the availability of multiple formats on VLeBooks.) Browns is currently working on adding this dual format information to the vendor website. Sue was also asked if Browns will be making DRM-free ebooks available to buy on their platform and she replied that they were looking into this.
Many thanks again to everyone who attended the open meeting and for all of your contributions. We look forward to seeing you again next year!
Please note that Cambridge librarians can download the presentation slides from the Cambridge Librarians intranet site.
ebooks@cambridge 