JISC Collections, in association with UK Higher Education, have launched a significant e-book project that will assess impacts, observe behaviours and develop new models to stimulate the UK higher education e-books market. The national e-books observatory project aims to fund and license collections of e-books that are highly relevant to UK higher education taught course students in four disciplines and evaluate the use of the e-books through deep log analysis. Knowledge acquired during the project will be shared with publishers, aggregators and libraries to help encourage an e-books market that has appropriate business and licensing models.
The deep log analysis study tender invites proposals to undertake a quantitative and qualitative analysis of the e-books made freely available to the UK higher education community as part of the project. Deep log analysis techniques should be used to monitor, analyse and evaluate the use of the e-books by students. The empirical data collected will be shared with the project partners to inform future e-book licensing, pricing and promotion strategies.
Further details are available here
1 comment:
I am certainly in favor of this project and will be trying to monitor its progress so I can see what sort of results it eventually arrives at. I know from personal experience the value of digital text to students in higher education. I only just completed my PhD at the University of Georgia in the U.S., and I’m not sure I would have made it through had it not been for the ease with which I was able to access so many journals and e-books. That being said, I think one of the biggest needs is for a device that works as a reader. Some have been introduced in the past, but to my knowledge none has caught the imagination of the public enough to result in widespread use. While most all of us spend more time reading a computer screen each day than an actual printed text, my experience has been that, given the option, most of us would prefer to be able to take our text out and sit on the balcony, or to the park. Meanwhile, the iPod has made music and video imminently portable. I fear that, should text remain fixed to a screen on a desk, over time it will lose out to other media.
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