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/

Stephen Davison
Head, UCLA Digital Library Program
University of California, Los Angeles

http://livingstone.library.ucla.edu
http://livingstone.library.ucla.edu/livingstone_archive/

Presentation

Evviva Weinraub Lajoie
Director, Emerging Technologies & Services
Oregon State University

The University of Oregon (UO) Libraries and Oregon State University (OSU) Libraries & Press have a successful four year collaborative partnership around digital collection management. Both institutions have undertaken efforts to support and create emerging trends with digital scholarship and publishing, and they have collaborated where advantageous. Efforts have included exploring tools, services, and the future of publishing in the digital age. The UO Libraries recently completed a needs assessment and environmental scan of digital scholarship support. This exercise led to the creation of a new digital scholarship center, which evolved from digital library services. OSU Libraries & Press have updated and launched a new strategic plan, which enhances the organization’s efforts toward exploration, experimentation, and enriched support. Oregon’s pioneer nature is at the heart of the collaborative relationship between the two very different institutions, providing for a competitive yet collaborative spirit. Fundamental to a successful collaboration is an ability to address and evaluate new services, understanding that in order to be successful, collaboration and sharing is fundamental for survival. This presentation will explore how these institutions have approached engaging with digital scholarship & publishing, collaboration, and outreach from Research I and Land Grant perspectives.

http://library.uoregon.edu/digitalscholarship/
http://library.oregonstate.edu/ets

Presentation

Katherine Skinner,
Executive Director
Educopia Institute, MetaArchive Cooperative

Matt Schultz
Program Manager
Educopia Institute, MetaArchive Cooperative

Gail McMillan
Director, Digital Library and Archives
Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University

Providing the ETDs of Today for the Researchers of Tomorrow (Halbert, Skinner, Schultz)

This briefing will highlight and discuss the early findings from an Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS)-funded project hosted by the University of North Texas that is researching and documenting a range of life cycle curation and preservation practices for electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs). An accompanying workshop is planned for summer 2013 in conjunction with United States Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Association (USetdA) 2013 conference. This project briefing will solicit advice on proper delivery formats. The briefing will also discuss developments toward a series of micro services that will assist ETD programs with enhancing the curation of their ETDs; implementation use cases will be discussed. Partners on this project include Educopia Institute, the Networked Digital Library of Theses & Dissertations, and the university libraries of Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (Virginia Tech), Pennsylvania State University, Boston College, Indiana State University, Rice University, and the University of Arizona.

http://metaarchive.org/imls

Do Open Access ETDs Effect Publishing Opportunities in the Sciences? Findings from the 2012 Survey of Academic Journal Editors (McMillan)

Although open public access to electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs) has been widely implemented in higher education, some faculty advisors and graduate student authors are still concerned that unfiltered access to their ETDs could diminish future publishing opportunities. This presentation will discuss a survey of academic journal editors about their attitudes towards ETDs that was conducted under the auspices of the Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations. At the fall 2011 Coalition for Networked Information meeting, results of a survey of social science and humanities editors and university press directors were reported. This presentation will share the latest survey findings regarding the policies of science journals in light of open access ETDs. It will also compare the results from the social science and humanities survey and the science survey as well as the 2012 and 1999 surveys of science editors’ attitudes towards ETDs.

Survey authors: Gail McMillan, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University; Marisa L. Ramirez, California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo; Joan Dalton, University of Windsor; Ann Hanlon, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee; Heather Smith, California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo; Chelsea Kern, California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo

Jonathan Wheeler
Data Curation Librarian
University of New Mexico

Kevin S. Hawkins
Head of Publishing Production, MPublishing
University of Michigan

Hosting Open Access Journals for the University and Beyond: The University of New Mexico Open Journals Portal (Comerford, Wheeler)

Print publishing costs for small scholarly journals continue to increase, and even electronic publishing options are not without ongoing costs. University of New Mexico (UNM) Libraries has found that many research organizations in New Mexico would like to provide open electronic access to their group’s publications, but simply do not have the funding or the technical expertise to host their own journal server on the Internet. This presentation will discuss the UNM Libraries’ Open Journal Systems (OJS) initiative, designed to provide fee-free electronic publishing services to both institutionally sponsored and independent research organizations in the Southwest. UNM Libraries’ scholarly resources team works directly with journal publishers to build journal websites, prepare journal issues for publication, and train each journal’s staff how to implement their editorial, subscription and administrative processes online.

Presentation (Comerford)

mPach: Publishing Directly in HathiTrust (Hawkins)

HathiTrust, a shared digital repository, has been archiving and providing access to reformatted library holdings. Since libraries are increasingly involved in open-access publishing of new journals, HathiTrust is a natural place to archive and provide access to born-digital publisher content to ensure its long-term preservation and discoverability. This presentation will give an overview of mPach, a modular, end-to-end system being developed by the University of Michigan Library for publishing journals in the HathiTrust repository, which will be made available for use by other HathiTrust member institutions.

 http://ejournals.unm.edu/
http://www.lib.umich.edu/mpach
Presentation (Hawkins)

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

Tyler Walters
Dean
Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University

Julie Speer
Associate Dean, Research and Informatics
Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University

Martin Halbert
Dean of Libraries
University of North Texas

Spencer Keralis
Director, Digital Scholarship Co-Operative
University of North Texas

This briefing will discuss a recently launched project to create a Library Publishing Coalition (LPC) dedicated to advancing the emerging field of library publishing, defined as the set of activities undertaken by college and university libraries to support the creation and dissemination of scholarly works.

The project is hosted by the Educopia Institute, and has been designed in collaboration with a large number of academic libraries, including Purdue University, the University of North Texas, and Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. Project participants currently number well over 40 institutions, all of which are providing seed support for this initiative at one of two participation levels: Founding and Contributing Institutions.

This briefing will review the initiative and several concrete project deliverables:
• A concentrated study that will document the current range of library publishing activities (including costs, staffing, and how libraries are financing these ventures); refine justification and positioning for library-based publishing activities; align library activities in this area with university needs and goals; and help additional libraries to envision and develop publishing services programs.
• A forum for networking and sharing communications about library publishing services, including an annual event and ongoing virtual training and community-building activities.
• The design and implementation of the LPC.

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