Millind Basole
eText Lead
University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign

The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign recently debuted an innovative approach to providing students with electronic textbooks and instructional materials. The etext platform and process provides an endpoint-neutral and completely accessible platform for presenting text, equations and a variety of multimedia in textbook form. The content comes from two major sources: faculty developed content (both where faculty retain copyright as well as open textbooks), and publisher owned content. Academic Technology Services is actively seeking to partner with the library to leverage library holdings for use in etextbooks where such uses are possible. The benefits of the etext at Illinois service includes considerably lower costs for students, publishing opportunities for faculty, device neutrality, and a platform that is markedly more accessible and easier to use than most commercial solutions. This briefing will include a demonstration of eText at Illinois and the technical infrastructure underlying it, a discussion of the process and approach to accessibility, and a review of future plans and strategies for expanding the service.

 https://etext.illinois.edu

Dana Voss
Program Manager, Internet2 Net+ Services
Internet2

Leveraging the Internet2 Network and enabling services like InCommon federated identity management, the Internet2 NET+ Services team is developing a portfolio of service offerings that bring value to Internet2 members. The goal of the program is to create services that are cost-effective, easy to access, simple to administer, and tailored to the unique needs of our community. This session will offer an overview of the Net+ program, including the eContent pilot, which is sponsored jointly by Internet2 and EDUCAUSE.

http://www.internet2.edu/netplus/
Presentation

Rodney Petersen
Managing Director of Washington Office & Senior Government Relations Officer
EDUCAUSE

Jarret Cummings
Policy Specialist
EDUCAUSE

Faculty, students, authors, and publishers all have a stake in the evolution of textbooks. As texts and business models are transformed variously by online interactivity and open-source content, what are the implications for the stakeholders? EDUCAUSE and Internet2 have been collaborating on e-text pilots to explore some of these issues. In addition to assessing how e-texts are best used, the multi-campus pilots seek to test new models for financing, distributing, and using e-texts. This session will include discussion about some of the policy issues, such as licensing versus sales, accessibility, affordability, rights, and privacy.

http://www.educause.edu/focus-areas-and-initiatives/policy-and-security/educause-policy/issues-and-positions/etexts-pilot-series

While many libraries are moving to subscription or leasing models for electronic journals and books, the 21 libraries of the Ontario Council of University Libraries have collaborated to build shared facilities and services for housing and managing large collections of licensed content. The Books and Journals service of Scholars Portal contain over 25M digital articles and close to 400,000 electronic books, including digitized print books and born digital commercial ebooks. This session will describe the rationale behind this commitment to physical ownership of digital content and the maturing of the service from providing simple aggregation to supporting long-term digital preservation.

http://journals.scholarsportal.info
http://books.scholarsportal.info

Presentation (PowerPoint)

February 10, 2012

In this report, CNI director Clifford Lynch discusses a wide range of issues:

• Mention of his conversation with David Lewis about e-textbooks
• New Media Consortium Horizon Project Megatrends Report – meeting summary
• The International Council for Science (ICSU) scenarios project
• A self-published e-book by Shelley Gehrig, I Heard the Sirens Scream
• White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) comments
• Long-term bit storage and economic and pricing models
• CNI’s Fall 2011 Executive Roundtable report on Risk Management and Disaster Planning

Joan Lippincott, CNI’s associate director, talks about sessions on assessment and on innovative student projects at the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U) meeting, and the ACRL Research Planning and Review Committee’s program Let’s Talk Trends: A Discussion of Higher Education Trends that Influence Academic Library Services & Systems, where she served as a panelist.  Joan references the following sources in her discussion:

• AAC&U 2012 Annual Meeting
  http://www.aacu.org/meetings/annualmeeting/index.cfm
• Documenting Uncertain Times (follow-up study to Academically Adrift)
  http://highered.ssrc.org/?page_id=158
• NILOA
  http://www.learningoutcomeassessment.org/
• NSSE
  http://nsse.iub.edu/

We hope you enjoy this program and we welcome your feedback.  For questions or comments related to CNI Conversations, please contact CNI Associate Executive Director Joan Lippincott at joan@cni.org.

February 7, 2012

CNI Executive Director Clifford Lynch speaks with David Lewis, Dean of Libraries, Indiana University Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) about new developments in electronic textbooks and the search for a new economic model.

We hope you enjoy this program and we welcome your feedback.  For questions or comments related to CNI Conversations, please contact CNI Associate Executive Director Joan Lippincott at joan@cni.org.

This session will review Indiana University’s (IU) etext program. IU has signed agreements to dramatically reduce the costs of digital textbooks for students on all of its campuses. The agreements (with publishers John Wiley & Sons, Inc.; Bedford Freeman & Worth Publishing Group; W.W. Norton; and Flat World Knowledge) will provide students with substantial cost-savings, the ability to access digital or printed hard copies, and uninterrupted access to all of their etexts while they are a student at IU. Indiana-based company Courseload was selected to provide the software for students to read and annotate their etexts. The software integrates directly with IU’s Oncourse system and enables students to tag, search, collaborate as a study group, or view multimedia on any computer or mobile device. Additionally, faculty who opt to use the software will have the ability to integrate notes, links and annotations on students’ etexts.

http://etexts.iu.edu