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/

Philip Konomos
Associate University Librarian
Arizona State University

For over a decade research universities have focused on building repositories and additional cyberinfrastructure to enhance and support new forms of 21st century research. With digital repositories in place, the time has come to address the next set of challenges: building content, assuring sustainability, and fostering new uses for existing repository content.

The Arizona State University Libraries has begun a set of initiatives working with faculty, research staff, and administrators in new and innovative ways. Efforts include targeting new (first and second year) tenure-track faculty to promote use of our repository services for research data; targeting senior, Baby-Boom generation faculty to help capture their legacy research data before they retire; building a catalog of learning objects to leverage existing repository content; and doing systematic outreach to colleges, schools, and research centers to embed library staff in grant-funded projects as early as possible (preferably at the grant writing stage).

http://lib.asu.edu/data
http://repository.asu.edu

Claire Stewart
Head, Digital Collections and Scholarly Communication Services
Northwestern University

The Institute of Museum and Library Services has funded a three-year project from 2011-2014, led by the libraries at Indiana University Bloomington and Northwestern University in collaboration with ten other institutional partners, to develop an open source system that will enable libraries and archives to easily curate, distribute, and provide online access to their audio and video collections. This project, known as the Avalon Media System, follows from extensive prior investigation into the needs of academic libraries for ingest, management, and access to digital audio and video collections to support teaching, learning, and research. Version 1.0 of Avalon will be released in Spring 2013. This presentation will include discussion of: 1) motivations for the development of Avalon; 2) current and planned system functionality; 3) collaboration with other open source software communities (including the Hydra Project and Opencast Matterhorn); 4) issues of community building for ongoing sustainability; and 5) how Avalon fits into the larger landscape of media content management in higher education. Time for general discussion of issues related to media content management and open source software sustainability will follow.

 http://www.avalonmediasystem.org/