Friday, April 18, 2008

JISC national e-books observatory project: findings from the first User Survey is now available

Higher Education (HE) libraries want to provide their students with online access to their course texts, free at the point of use. Such equality of access is deemed to be a responsibility of the library, particularly in light of widening participation agendas, increasing student numbers and the expectations of staff and students. The JISC national e-books observatory project aims to stimulate the provision of course texts online through the library by making freely available course texts online in four subject areas (business and management studies, engineering, medicine and media studies) and gathering much needed evidence.

JISC has funded CIBER to gather all this evidence through a Deep Log Analysis (DLA) Study. The DLA study not only analyses the log data to identify real time patterns of discovery and use for the 36 course texts JISC has made freely available, but gathers quantitative data from users through surveys and case studies.

This first user survey provides an initial benchmark against which to measure changes as the JISC national e-books observatory project progresses.

Further details can be found here.

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