Electronic textbooks (or e-textbooks) and their business models are evolving quickly and represent a singular opportunity for the higher education community to serve students more efficiently both academically and financially. Motivated by the desire to enhance student learning outcomes, reduce student expenditures on course materials and influence the terms of sustainable business models, the University at Buffalo Libraries has administered four different e-textbook pilots serving over 2000 students over the last nine months. These include:
- a course-based pilot facilitated by Internet2/ EDUCAUSE (CourseLoad)
- a site license targeted to introductory biology courses (Nature Publishing Group)
- a multi-campus State University of New York pilot (CourseSmart)
- a student-based pilot facilitated by Internet2/ EDUCAUSE (CourseSmart)

This project briefing will discuss the common and unique administrative challenges and opportunities of the pilots, including engagement of teaching faculty, identity management issues, necessary partnerships, and license negotiations. The briefing will also focus on student and faculty attitudinal survey data and usage statistics that address learning outcomes, e-textbook features and functionality, format preferences, and cost considerations.

 http://library.buffalo.edu/findlibrarymaterials/e-textbooks/

In the fall of 2010, Cornell University began implementing a “reimagined” model for delivering information technology (IT) services on campus, based on a set of recommendations developed with significant input from Bain & Co., a global consulting firm. Cornell is now three years into the process of creating a much more integrated and collaborative IT organization, and the university is starting to reap some major benefits from doing things very differently.

This talk will describe the significant changes that have taken place in IT service delivery, IT governance, and providing IT software solutions at Cornell, from the perspective of both the Cornell University Library and the campus as a whole. In some cases, Cornell adopted the recommendations of Bain and the original re-imagining process, and in other cases, it deliberately chose different approaches. The presentation will include an analysis of the organizational, cultural, and operational changes that have taken place in IT over the past three years, outlining both the successes and the remaining challenges. Finally, the talk will include a brief look at Cornell’s recently completed IT Strategic Plan, which seeks to “guide prudent reallocation of our IT investments from utilities to academic differentiators” while providing stable and efficient utility IT services. The IT@Cornell model of “intentional interdependence” within the university and seeking the best services and collaborations available from the outside world should be of significant interest to many educational institutions facing similar IT challenges.

http://www.cni.org/topics/user-services/reimagining-it-at-cornell-university/
http://www.cornell.edu/reimagining/it-review.cfm
http://www.it.cornell.edu/cio/index.cfm

Steven Morales
Program Director
Digital Preservation Network

This session will address the progress that has been made in the six months since the Digital Preservation Network (DPN) was announced. With almost 60 institutional members, DPN builds upon the higher education community’s current preservation efforts by creating a federated preservation network, owned by and for the academy, which will provide secure digital archiving of the scholarly and cultural record. At the heart of DPN is a commitment to replicate the data and metadata of research and scholarship across diverse software architectures, organizational structures, geographic regions, and political environments. Replication diversity, combined with succession rights management, will ensure that future generations have access to today’s discoveries and insights.

http://www.dpn.org/

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

David Marques
Senior Vice President, Research Data Services
Elsevier

Funding agencies are displaying two counteracting trends regarding research data repositories: on the one hand, partly motivated by a need for reproducibility and fear of fraud, funding agencies are encouraging scientists and scholars to make their (raw and summarized) research data available in open, publicly accessible repositories; on the other, they are de-scoping and defunding the maintenance of many well-established data repositories. To address this dichotomy, and the clear and present need for the population and maintenance of open research data repositories, more technically and socially acceptable models of and tools for representing, uploading and storing research data are needed, as are innovative and collaborative business models for maintaining data repositories in a scalable, sustainable way.

Elsevier is interested in exploring novel (open, public access-based) collaborations and business models to address both of these needs, and provide uploading, maintenance and annotation tasks and tools in a service-based model. The company is interested in discussing and exploring the views of the Coalition for Networked Information community regarding the relative role of libraries, data repositories, and publishers to develop an open and sustainable research data infrastructure. Issues to discuss include the development of researcher-controlled distribution of research data, and the assessment of attribution, credit and impact of research data, as well as metadata and archiving standards. This talk will include Elsevier’s thoughts and current projects in this direction and then invite comments and ideas from the community on the practical, philosophical and financial possibilities for publishers and libraries to collaborate on this important and emerging topic.

With the recent introductions of DuraCloud, Preservica, Glacier and others, preservation has joined most other applications in being offered as a cloud service, Preservation as a Service (PaaS). Does PaaS make technical, economic or business sense? What characteristics make applications cloud-friendly? If outsourcing to third-party cloud services is such a great idea, why do companies that get big enough all build their own clouds? Can cooperative efforts to build academic clouds yield benefits?

This talk is based on research, which is on-going, into the economic models of long-term storage with participants from the LOCKSS Program, the University of California at Santa Cruz’s Storage System Research Center, Stony Brook University, and NetApp. It will also include presentation of data from a Library of Congress funded experiment that ran a LOCKSS box in Amazon’s cloud.

http://newsscape.library.ucla.edu/

http://blog.dshr.org/2012/12/talk-at-fall-2012-cni.html

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

June 6, 2012

CNI Executive Director Clifford Lynch speaks with James Hilton, Chief Information Officer, University of Virginia about the Digital Preservation Network (DPN), an initiative which aims to create a federated approach to preservation of academic content:

“To avoid the catastrophic loss of scholarship, we must build and sustain a diverse ecosystem that can ensure the survival of scholarship in digital form for future generations.  We envision a system that is scalable, sustainable, and complementary to existing collection and preservation efforts—the Digital Preservation Network (DPN or Deepen).”

For more information about DPN visit http://www.dpn.org/.

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.