SOMETHING IN COMMON Pacific University (top) includes links to the Digital Commons Network alongside commercial databases.
A Digital Commons journal (below) from Purdue University

Visitors to the new Digital Commons Network (DCN) portal recently launched by bepress are greeted with a clean layout featuring one prominent, ornate graphic—a large, three-layered, color-coded wheel encircling a simple invitation: “Explore 691,431 works from 275 institutions.”

As the new portal to content produced and stored using bepress’s widely used Digital Commons publishing and institutional repository platform, those numbers will continue to grow, but two key qualities of this resource are expected to remain constant. These works will all be full text, and they will all be open access.

“From the reader’s perspective, we wanted no dead ends,” explains bepress president and CEO Jean-Gabriel Bankier. “We wanted their experience to be that when they browse, they would always find a PDF. So if you’re in the network, you will never find only metadata. And you’ll also never find any restricted content. So every reader experience will end at a PDF. And when they’re in the PDF, they can click a link to take them back to the network. The whole thing is integrated.”

Founded in 1999 by University of California, Berkeley professors Robert Cooter, Aaron Edlin, and Ben Hermalin, bepress began as a suite of online editorial management tools for producing peer-reviewed journals. In addition to the Digital Commons, the for-profit company has also produced the research announcement tool SelectedWorks.

Given libraries’ institutional mission to provide broad access to works across a wide variety of disciplines, an online portal promising perpetual, free access to hundreds of thousands of full-text, peer-reviewed articles, Ph.D. dissertations, master’s theses, conference proceedings, research data, and other content sounds like a logical next step in terms of cross-institutional collaboration. Indeed, bepress views DCN as a natural extension of the mission behind its Digital Commons software service, which enables institutions to publish their own professional quality, peer-reviewed journals, create landing pages for their faculty to highlight research published elsewhere, and build institutional repositories in a way that consolidates a university’s intellectual output. In each case, the primary goal of the Digital Commons platform is raising the visibility of an institution and its research. DCN helps achieve that goal by making it easy for users to search all Digital Commons repositories at once.

And while institutional repositories are typically indexed by search engines, the portal makes it very easy to access a large collection of open access (OA) materials that are specific to a discipline, notes David Scherer, scholarly repository specialist for the Purdue University e-Pubs Repository, IN.

“With a lot of open access materials, depending where you place them—whether it’s a public website or a private faculty web page—they can be hard to find,” he says. “If I’m trying to find items on civil engineering, am I going to know to look [in the repositories] of institutions x, y, and z? This is a database that I can use as a resource, just like any other library-based resource or tool, to find these kinds of materials.”

Color wheel

The starburst wheel graphic on the portal’s network.bepress.com homepage helps illustrate this concept to newcomers. The wheel features ten color-coded disciplines: law, social and behavioral sciences, arts and humanities, life sciences, physical sciences and mathematics, education, engineering, medicine and health sciences, business, and architecture. The size of each color-coded area reflects the size of each discipline’s collection relative to the rest of DCN.

Two additional layers radiate out from this central “discipline wheel.” The first narrows down the discipline into a selection of subdisciplines, while the second allows users to pick from subjects within that subdiscipline. For example, hover a mouse pointer over the innermost, purple segment of the discipline wheel, and a visitor is encouraged to “Explore Medicine and Health Sciences.” Move the mouse to the second purple layer and the wheel will advise users to “Explore Medical Specialties” or “Explore Public Health.” Or users can mouse out one additional layer beyond the “Medical Specialties” subdiscipline to browse a selection of subjects including neurology, pediatrics, or radiology.

At any point, users can click on any segment of any layer of the wheel, and the wheel will begin a brief animation, with the selected discipline, subdiscipline, or subject swallowing up the rest of the wheel and navigating users to their chosen commons area where they can then proceed to a list of full-text PDFs.

To be clear, typing a couple of keywords into the “Search Entire Network” box, also located on the homepage, might be a more efficient method than mousing around on this graphical browsing element. But from a design perspective, this colorful wheel plays an important role in communicating the vision and purpose of DCN and the institutional repositories served by Digital Commons.

“We wanted for each repository to be able to show visitors who came there, visually, what’s in it,” Bankier says. “It’s a way for them to describe, graphically, what are their areas of strength? What are their areas of expertise? Each of the repositories in Digital Commons has its own graph, its own discipline wheel.”

For individual faculty members and researchers, DCN also helps illustrate that a contribution to an institutional repository is a contribution to its discipline, Bankier adds.

“One of our goals, from the perspective of the authors, was to address the ‘island problem,’ ” he says. “They saw their own institutional repository as an island, and they didn’t see how it connected with their discipline. And authors care first about themselves, then they care about their discipline, and only then care about their institution. We wanted [to illustrate] that a contribution to their repository was a meaningful contribution to their discipline as well.”

Isaac Gilman, an assistant professor and scholarly communications and research services librarian for Pacific University, OR, agrees with Bankier’s assessment.

“Having all of the repository content from a variety of institutions accessible through one portal and one place makes it a lot easier to have the conversation with students and faculty about how, when they’re contributing to our institutional repository, they’re contributing their work to a broader disciplinary conversation,” Gilman says. “Within the [DCN] portal or platform, they can see their work right next to work from people within their discipline…. That’s really valuable in helping to emphasize that what you put in our repository doesn’t just stay at Pacific and isn’t just going to be related to other work at ­Pacific, but it’s going to be related to other work across the country and across the world.”

Friendly competition

Each commons area page also features lots of top-level, at-a-glance statistics, including the number of articles, authors, and downloads, and a short list of institutions and authors who have contributed the most downloaded papers. Users can also click on a link to a pie chart that illustrates which institutions have contributed the most content to a specific commons.

One librarian has already found this pie chart to be a great motivational tool. In theory, most faculty will quickly understand the benefits of a repository and the ways it can help them raise the profile of their work and their institution. But encouraging faculty to contribute articles and data regularly can still pose a challenge. Figuring out which of their articles can be legally contributed to an OA repository and then uploading their work take time. If there’s no momentum behind the repository concept in their department or in their field, contributing can get pushed far down an individual researcher’s list of priorities.

So, at Iowa State University, digital repository coordinator Harrison Inefuku used DCN’s institution pie chart to stoke a spirit of competition. Iowa State launched its Digital Commons repository in April 2012, and when Inefuku began efforts to engage faculty, the university’s agricultural and biosystems engineering department was the first to buy in to the concept as a group.

“After bepress launched the Digital Commons Network, I was looking at it, trying to see if it could help me try to reach these faculty and try to get them to participate,” Inefuku says. Opening the institution pie chart in the Bioresource and Agricultural Engineering Commons area, he discovered that Iowa State had already become the second-largest contributor in this subject. It illustrated how much the repository had already grown, while giving the agriculture and biosystems engineering department faculty another goal to shoot for—the number of repository items contributed by their peers at the University of Nebraska.

“[Nebraska] has had its repository for a long time…the number of items in every subject are a lot higher than ours just starting out,” Inefuku said. “I thought it would be a great opportunity to show them ‘this is where we are, this is where Nebraska is, and I would really like us to pass Nebraska.’ ”

It worked. He presented his challenge to the department in December 2012, and by March 2013, Iowa State was responsible for over half of the content contributed to the Bioresource and Agricultural Engineering Commons.

Open for access

Aside from showcasing a university’s research capital or encouraging faculty to contribute to their institutional repository, DCN has its own merits as a full-text database that any library can encourage patrons to try.

Pacific University has already taken direct links to the different disciplinary commons areas and included them in the list of online databases to which the university offers access. A student searching biology-related databases, for example, will find a link to the Life Sciences Commons on the same page as resources from Gale, ProQuest, EBSCO, and Springer.

“I really do see it as a resource that is just as valuable as a [commercial] database aggregator’s product,” Gilman says. “And we want to try to make students aware of the wide variety of scholarly content that’s out there, because repositories do have a wide variety of really useful content, ranging from formal publications all the way to gray literature. And we’re encouraging students and faculty to recognize the value in this variety of scholarly products.”

“It drives users to our repositories,” says Purdue’s Scherer. “We’re always trying to increase the visibility of our open access repositories and our content, and we’re doing this in a mechanism that users are most familiar with—having a database. Compare it to how journals and the indexing databases work: you have a journal, and it has a web presence, but then, it’s enhanced tremendously by [inclusion in] a database.”

Inefuku agreed, noting that while the open access movement has created new opportunities in academic publishing, there have also been unfortunate side effects, including the rise of predatory journals. As a network of repositories that have been vetted by their respective institutions, DCN offers a reliable starting point for students and researchers seeking open access content.

“When it comes to searching for information online, especially [at] an academic institution, we still have to do our part with information literacy, telling our researchers and students how to find quality websites, how to find quality information,” Inefuku says. “With the open access movement, it’s creating a lot of opportunities to get scholarship out there. But…there’s a flip side to that as well.”

In its first year, DCN already appears to be having a significant impact on downloads from Digital Commons repositories. Six months after launching in November 2012, total full-text downloads from the approximately 300 repositories that Digital Commons serves had reached 130 million—up 85 percent from the same period a year earlier, according to Bankier. And well-used institutional repositories could give university administrators additional motivation to support open access, he says.

“Open access is kind of like preservation. It doesn’t have funding behind it,” Bankier says. “I would argue that this is a sustainable model, because the work that the library is doing directly connects to the mission and goals of the institution. Demonstrating value and strengthening reputation are things that all universities care about and are willing to fund…. This is a win, win, win. The university wins because it gets more visibility by sharing its research, the library wins because it gets to save [database subscription fees], and the public wins because they get free access to scholarship that they wouldn’t have had access to otherwise.”

Matt Enis (menis@mediasourceinc.com is Associate Editor, Technology, LJ

The HathiTrust Digital Library will partner with the recently launched Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) to expand discovery and use of HathiTrust’s public domain and other openly available content.

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“HathiTrust’s joining the Digital Public Library of America more than doubles the size of our unified collection, and—as so many have asked for—fills it with millions of books. We couldn’t be more delighted. Over the last five years, HathiTrust has built an incredible digital infrastructure to store the scanned holdings of its many university and library partners, and we in turn look forward to providing a large general audience for these valuable works, and new pathways into them,” said Dan Cohen, DPLA’s Executive Director.

According to HathiTrust Executive Director John Wilkin, the partnership reflects the complementary nature of the two organizations. “The first priority of HathiTrust has always been preservation,” he said. “But to fulfill the preservation mission, we must provide access: content that can’t be found and used risks being forgotten.” Wilkin stressed that HathiTrust will continue to enhance its own discovery and access platform, first launched in 2008. But DPLA puts HathiTrust’s collection before a broader audience, alongside innovative search and use tools, including timelines, maps, and a growing number of apps.

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Of HathiTrust’s nearly 11 million volumes, the metadata records associated with the almost 3.5 million that are freely available will be accessible on the web at dp.la, and through the DPLA application programming interface (API), making HathiTrust a DPLA “content hub.” (The digitized volumes themselves will continue to reside in HathiTrust.) The partnership makes HathiTrust the single largest DPLA content hub, in the company of institutions such as the Smithsonian, the National Archives, the New York Public Library, and many others.

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[Our emphasis] The partnership officially begins today, June 18, 2013, and the data is in the process of being transferred from HathiTrust to the Digital Public Library of America. DPLA will be working to add a special interface for books to supplement its novel map and timeline browsing interfaces, but the HathiTrust content will be available through the current site as soon as the data is loaded.

Read the Complete Announcement

In other HT News…John Wilkin Named Dean of Libraries and University Librarian at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Will Leave Exec Director Position at HathiTrust

Library For All

Former construction industry executive Rebecca McDonald got the idea for the ebook platform after moving to Haiti in 2010 to help the country rebuild in the aftermath of that year’s devastating earthquake. Noticing a conspicuous shortage of textbooks at a Haitian school, and realizing that the rapid growth of the mobile telecom sector in Haiti and throughout the developing world could make ebook distribution simple and inexpensive, McDonald worked with Tanyella Evans to found Library For All in 2011. Evans is now Chief Operating Officer. With a minimal staff and an advisory board that includes Peter Balis, director of digital strategic partnerships and business development for John Wiley & Sons and Lisa Sharkey, senior VP and director of creative development at HarperCollins, the team has spent the past year planning the platform and negotiating with several major publishers.

Developed in partnership with Thoughtworks, the platform will manage publisher-donated, DRM-protected content with a one-user, one-book model, along with a curated collection of open educational resources (OER) in a cloud-based environment that will not require a local server. Wireless routers designed to work with mobile networks (similar to the BRCK router developed by Kenya-based tech nonprofit Ushahidi) will then distribute ebooks and other materials anywhere there is mobile reception, Evans told LJ. The platform is designed to be device agnostic, with content optimized for inexpensive tablets such as Datawind’s Aakash line.

With the pilot test at the Respire School, Library For All plans to prove the platform’s viability and assure publishers that it can manage donated digital content securely in a single school environment with 500 students. If they can prove that the model works, the pilot will expand within Haiti and will be introduced into two new countries in 2014 via partnerships with local ministries of education and NGOs.

In an effort to boost pledges from small donors, Library For All on Monday launched a “10 Friends x $10 x 10 days” social media campaign, encouraging Facebook users to pledge $10 and tell 10 of their friends about the project from June 10 through June 20.

A recent white paper, which Springer researched in conjunction with librarians from Wellesley College and Boston University, reported a very high rate of ebook usage among faculty and undergraduates at small colleges. At Wellesley, 71 percent of students and faculty said that they used ebooks in 2011. That total included non-academic and leisure reading, but more than half of these ebook users also said that they had downloaded ebooks from the Wellesley College Library collection. By comparison, the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project released a more comprehensive survey of all U.S. adults in April 2012, which indicated that only about 21 percent of U.S. adults had read an ebook in 2011.

Historically, Springer has worked primarily with large research universities, but about three years ago, account managers began noticing a growing number of ebook inquiries from smaller institutions. Unfortunately, the publisher’s tiered pricing system “was well above what these schools could afford,” said David Celano, Springer’s vice president of library sales. Librarians at smaller institutions also tended to believe that only a small portion of Springer’s collection of mostly STEM-field titles would appeal to undergraduates, Celano added.

“We spent a lot of time researching what the best price point would be based on the size of the institution,” he said. “If you’re a community college, the price for the 2013 complete Springer ebook collection—I believe we’re going to have about 5,800 titles in it—is along the lines of about $6,500.”

Continued Growth

Ebooks are continuing to gain acceptance among students and faculty, the white paper indicates. While only about 12 percent of students and faculty said that they preferred ebooks to print, 35 percent said that they view ebooks as an acceptable alternative to print. Almost 40 percent said that they use ebooks, but prefer print books, and about 10 percent said that they do not want to use ebooks, but sometimes have no choice.

Presumably, adoption and acceptance of ebooks will continue to increase as the popularity of tablets, smartphones, and dedicated ebook readers continues to grow. The white paper notes that “device owners in general show a much higher level of acceptance of ebooks than people who do not own devices. Respondents who do not own and do not plan to purchase a mobile device show a much higher preference for print. The data does not provide a clear cause and effect.”

For libraries, however, the pricing of the collection enables a college to offer access to a much larger selection of content than would be possible if using the same funds for print titles, said Maura Diamond, senior account manager for Springer Science+Business Media.

Content from several Springer imprints could have cross-disciplinary appeal, Diamond said. Technical publisher Apress Media, for example, offers titles on designing apps or programming in JavaScript, while Island Press features titles on popular topics such as sustainability and environmental science. And even in the most complex titles, undergraduates or their professors may find introductory chapters helpful.

“We’ll have a 1,200 page book that covers a really advanced topic in let’s say, artificial intelligence, but the first three chapters give you the breakdown you needed to get into the basic idea,” Diamond said. “It’s perfect for an undergraduate student.”

Prior to the pilot, OCLS already had a comprehensive computer training program in place for patrons, featuring  multi-part series on topics including basic computing, Microsoft Office, Photoshop, Quickbooks, 3D design, and website design using HTML5.

“The computer classes here have been very popular for a long time,” said John Douglass, assistant manager of the Technology and Education Center for OCLS. “People have been getting more and more interested in advanced classes. We’ve introduced more advanced Excel classes covering formulas and functions, pivot tables and creating macros. Recently we’ve also been creating some classes that touch on programming and classes that touch on mobile web app development, and we’ve seen early demand for those classes. So, certainly we think that the thirst for that advanced training is definitely out there.”

OCLS also offered access to Lynda.com kiosks for patrons who wanted to learn more. But recently representatives from Orlando-based Treehouse approached the library about developing a model that would enable an unlimited number of patrons to access similar online courses from any computer in OCLS libraries, or from home by logging in with their library card number.

“On their website, they cover more advanced CSS, which we touch on in our HTML5 series, and then they’re off to Javascript, PHP, Ruby on Rails, iOS and Android App creation,” said Douglass. “Those are all things that we knew people were interested in, but we didn’t necessarily have the capability to provide training in.”

Similar to Khan Academy or Lynda.com, the online courses are taught via a series of short, pre-recorded videos. Short quizzes and code challenges follow the videos to help ensure user comprehension.

The program was launched at OCLS in February, and after including information on their website and marketing the program with posters in the library, the service was already becoming popular by March.

“By March we saw a big jump in the amount of sign-ups,” said Douglass. “The video views we were counting jumped by ten-fold, and then in April we saw good numbers as well…. I think we’ll see steady growth over time.”

Treehouse emphasizes the role that its courses can play in job training. In an email to LJ, Chief Commercial Officer Chris Zabaleta described this as part of the company’s mission, noting that “we are very focused on getting our students into jobs or better jobs. “

And prior to launching the program with Treehouse, OCLS already had one in-house success story of its own.

After working through Treehouse courses on web development, part-time Branch Circulation Clerk Kristin Retaleato was promoted to a fulltime Web Design Specialist position at the Orlando Public Library.

“They have a big emphasis on jobs. As our patrons go and explore that certainly that’s going to be a huge appealing factor.”

Treehouse has begun offering libraries one-year contracts on similar terms, with pricing based on a library’s number of active cardholders.

Hachette Book Group

Since the passage of the Chafee Amendment in 1996, NLS and other approved organizations have been authorized to reproduce books in audio or other specialized formats for use by print disabled patrons without seeking the permission of the copyright holder. However, the time-consuming, labor-intensive nature of audiobook production significantly limits the number of titles that most nonprofits and libraries are able to complete on an annual basis.

The discussions between Hachette and NLS that led to this new program were prompted by author Douglas Preston. Preston received a letter from a fan asking whether the latest book in the Pendergast series that he co-authors with Lincoln Child would be available in audiobook format via the Talking Books program. That letter then led Hachette to explore the expansion of its audiobook offerings at NLS.

“As a publisher, Hachette Book Group strives to make authors’ content as widely accessible as possible, and the NLS program is the perfect channel to reach fans of our books and audiobooks who otherwise may not have the opportunity to experience those works,” Anthony Goff, Hachette’s VP of Audio and Large Print Publishing, said in the announcement.

The Four Corners of the Sky

“We want to demonstrate once and for all the enormous influence of the library demographic, and that when libraries put an ebook in their catalog it serves a valuable role in increasing exposure and engagement with an author’s work,” Steve Potash, OverDrive’s CEO, told LJ when the project was first announced on May 3.

This preliminary data would seem to indicate that the project has been a success so far. Between 360,000 and 377,000 patrons visited their participating library’s OverDrive site each day on May 15 and 16, and about 9,000 of those visitors clicked through to the content detail page for The Four Corners of the Sky. The title was then checked out by 3,226 patrons on launch day, and 3,321 the following day. Checkouts then leveled off during the next week, holding steady between 2,400 to 2,600 per day. Ohio’s Cuyahoga County Public Library currently leads all participating systems with 1,113 total checkouts during the nine-day period, followed by the Oregon Digital Library Consortium with 583.

After peaking at 3,321 on May 16, the second day of the promotion, checkouts have leveled off, remaining in a consistent range between 2,400 to 2,600 per day.

About 7,500 public, academic, military, and school libraries are participating in the promotion—less than one-third of the global network served by OverDrive. Although several major library systems, including Toronto, Los Angeles, and Cleveland signed up for the program, many other major metropolitan library systems chose not to opt in, with most non-participating libraries declining due to a lack of lead time to prepare for the promotion, according to OverDrive Director of Marketing David Burleigh. Rollout is ongoing, and new libraries have continued to opt in since launch.

In an email to LJ, Burleigh wrote that other publishers have already expressed interest in working with OverDrive on similar projects, and indicated that, in the future, more lead time will likely be given for this type of promotion.

OverDrive will be sharing additional news regarding the Big Library Read project this week at BookExpo America (BEA) in New York.

Described as a “public-private-people partnership,” the event is being further described as “the largest ever to bring together citizens from around the country to work with local, state, and federal governments—as well as private sector organizations—with the common goal of improving their community through technology,” according to the IMLS announcement.

The announcement notes that tech-savvy citizens and entrepreneurs have developed many apps that utilize publicly released government data to a variety of ends, such as helping people report potholes to their local streets department, helping people communicate with local food shelters to identify shortage and excess in different neighborhoods to facilitate redistribution, or simply helping people catch a bus or train on time.

IMLS will present participants with two challenges. A public library challenge will encourage programmers to build tools that help users explore data from IMLS’s annual public library data collection efforts in new ways, and a museum data challenge encourages participants to develop tools that could enrich IMLS national museum data collection efforts using administrative data from the Museums Count survey. More information is available at the hackforchange.org website.

“Libraries and museums are centers for civic engagement in communities across the country,” IMLS Director Susan Hildreth said in the announcement. “We encourage them to join us in this first ever National Day of Civic Hacking by hosting events and by using their own in-house expertise to rise to the challenge with new civic hacks that address community needs. We can’t wait to see what kind of useful tools the nation’s online citizenry can create with IMLS data.”

National Day of Civic Hacking is backed by the White House through the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), and currently 20 federal agencies are participating. To date, events have been registered in more than 80 cities in 32 states, as well as the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico.

Califa and CCCL worked closely with Douglas County Libraries (DCL) and Colorado’s Marmot Library Network to create Enki, according to Califa Project Manager Heather Teysko. DCL pioneered the use of in-house Adobe Content Servers to manage ebooks purchased directly from authors, small publishers, and indie distributors such as Smashwords, and they were eager to help launch similar projects elsewhere. But it wasn’t as simple as handing over their code.

DCL’s system “was written just to serve one ILS, and with us being a consortium of 220 libraries, we needed it to authenticate against multiple ILSs,” Teysko said. “That was a real stickler for several months.”

There were other significant issues. For example, many publishers provide ebook metadata and order information in spreadsheets or other formats. New code had to be written to simplify metadata ingestion so that it does not have to be done manually.

The result of their work is a fully-functional platform that will soon enable hundreds of library systems to manage directly—rather than license via an aggregator—a portion of their ebook collections (the issue of intellectual property ownership, which would cover ebooks, remains a topic of much debate, but one that does not seem to legally favor libraries despite some use of the word own rather than license). The State Library of Kansas, which provided early financial support to the project, plans to adopt Enki soon as well, and other consortia and state systems have expressed interest. [EDIT: Teysko indicated that the project will likely go open source after an assessment period following the rollout to Califa's members.]

“I don’t think everybody needs to reinvent the wheel,” Teysko said. “Each library doesn’t have the resources to do something like this on their own. That’s why we saw the need for us to be able to step in and say ‘we’re a consortium, we can do this, and maybe others can join in.’”

In terms of reinventing the wheel, CCCL had been working quietly on its own approach to developing an ebook platform for which libraries manage file distribution and digital rights management (DRM) directly, and was in the process of applying for grant funding just prior to Califa’s announcement of the project last year. The two organizations soon partnered. CCCL provided significant software development support with assistance of The Quipu Group, and Califa focused on facilitating the project and negotiating with publishers, which will initially include Workman, Dzanc, Smashwords, Akashic, Crossroads Press,  National Highlights, Infobase, and others.

“It just turned out to be a perfect match,” said CCCL Deputy County Librarian Cathy Sanford.

Sanford added that Enki offers patrons an experience very similar to what they might expect from vendor platforms.

“It’s a pretty good user interface for keyword searching,” Sanford said. “The login, the checkout, all of the things that people are accustomed to seeing on OverDrive or any of the other platforms, they’re pretty much the same.”

With more advanced searches, Enki suffers by comparison to the latest commercial platforms, she added, “but I don’t think the user is experiencing [Enki] much differently than the other platforms…. The feedback we’re getting from our staff and from other people, including other IT professionals who understand what Enki is and what it’s supposed to be doing—and who understand that we’re still working on it—they’ve all said that they think it looks very good and it works very well. And we’re not getting any complaints from the public. That’s always a good sign.”

The open-source nature of the platform will also enable Califa, Marmot, and other libraries and developers to potentially add features and functionality to Enki and then share them with the library community.

The library ebook landscape has changed significantly since the project was first announced in March 2012. At that point, Random House and HarperCollins were the only two big six publishers committed to licensing ebooks to libraries.

The past several months have brought a series of welcome announcements, and now all of the largest U.S. publishers have begun either fully licensing ebooks to libraries once again, or have become involved in ebook pilot programs with libraries.

Yet in every case, titles from those publishers are only available via agreements made through third-party distributors. Developing a platform on which ebooks are managed directly rather than licensed remains vital to the future of libraries, Teysko said.

“I don’t think the library mission is about making OverDrive profits. To me, the idea that you would take such a major part of your business, and turn it over to another company that has very different motivations than you do,” is far from ideal, she said. “This isn’t about us trying to replace the vendors. But it is about us having some ownership over what we’re putting out there to the public.”

At CCCL, Sanford agreed.

“I believe that it is so important of our content, and control the destiny of what happens with our reading material. Just because [publishers and vendors] decide today that they are coming around doesn’t mean that they won’t change that model six months or five years from now. It’s not set in stone. And I have this real fear that we could turn into a country where only rich people are able to read…. And, I believe that libraries are tired of other people telling us what to do and shaping our industry for us. We have got to step up to the plate and take ownership.”

Meanwhile, several institutions have already used the Creator tool to produce anthologies on topics ranging from the history of Jazz in New Orleans to a biography of Daniel Samper Ortega, Director of the National Library of Colombia from 1931 to 1938. Most notably, last fall, BiblioLabs developed a 19th Century Historical Books iPad App for the British Library, and the library then used BiblioBoard Creator to sustain the app by generating smaller thematic anthologies on complementary topics.

Individuals have created interesting collections as well: David Ensminger, instructor of English, Humanities, and Folklore for Lee College Texas, has been an active chronicler of U.S. punk rock since the 1980s, conducting interviews with bands, collecting show flyers and ephemera, and publishing the 1980s fanzine No Deposit, No Return, and later the magazine Left of the Dial, which was distributed through record stores from 1999 through 2005.

Some of his personal collections can be viewed on his blog Visual Vitriol or in his books. But his new anthology “The Punk and Indie Rock Compendium: Left of the Dial” presents the material in a more interactive way than print or the web, he said.

“To me, it’s a really immersive environment,” he said. “You can click on photos, you can click on interviews, you can click on letters [to the editor], you can click on the old covers to the magazine. On your mobile device, you can open up and read these magazines that… have literally disappeared.”

Meanwhile, at the University of Denver, Lecturer in Music Theory Kristin Taavola, PhD, used the Creator tool to produce Musical Form: A Curated Collection for Tonal Analysis, an anthology that is now used as a digital textbook for her students.

“The benefit to students is huge—I was able to focus the repertoire for a single course on Form and Analysis, and embed not only scores but videos into the app,” she told LJ. “Most music theory textbooks include recordings by university students rather than famous musicians whom the students know and respect. In addition, with Bibliolabs, students can use scores online or print them out, so if they want to do several analyses of one piece, there is always a clean score available.”

The anthology also saved her students money, Taavola added.

“Because any of the musical anthologies available in text form cost $100 or possibly $200+, the app is a great savings for the students. It’s also easier for me; when I use a published anthology, I often supplement with other pieces I want to teach.”

Anthologies are produced in a three step process using the creator interface. During the “discovery” stage, users can select from public domain content provided by BiblioLabs—such as out-of-copyright books—or upload their own content. Basic metadata is then entered for each new item, via fields including license type, title, subtitle, creator, publication date, publisher, volume, edition, description, and source URL.

During the second stage, “enhancement,” users must check to ensure that each item has been uploaded properly, check for quality, and select a thumbnail image to display for each item. Then during the “marketing” stage, users upload icons and logos for the collection, and input keywords, a search engine optimization (SEO) description, an anthology description, and an audience description to make the anthology discoverable online.

Left of the Dial anthology for iPad

Ensminger was an early adopter of the creator platform, and said “at first, I did have trouble with it. I didn’t think it was very intuitive.” But the company upgraded the platform twice during the three months that he spent compiling his Left of the Dial anthology. In terms of ease-of-use, he said that the latest version was much improved, and compared it to a content management system (CMS) used to generate posts on websites.

“It’s kind of like using a WordPress blog,” he said. “There’s ready-made templates, you click and upload, create captions. They had kind of a rough start, but it’s become much more streamlined.”

While the tool may be useful, the quality of the resulting anthologies is dependent on the effort that the curator expends compiling them.

The app blog iPad Insight gave BiblioBoard a negative review after downloading the free BiblioBoard app and then exploring two anthologies—the works of Jack London and Dogs: A Historical Collection—each priced at $15.99. The reviewer complained that “the vast majority or perhaps all the content in BiblioBoard is freely available, public domain material,” and argued that for anthologies priced at a premium, one would expect a more optimized experience, rather than a collection of scans. In addition, neither of the anthologies purchased by the reviewer included audio or video, which led him to question the app’s promise of a multimedia experience.

Inconsistent experiences may prove an issue for customers who are paying for anthologies created by third parties, especially those looking to generate a profit. But BiblioLabs is working on its own set of modules on subjects including Military History, African American History, Women’s Studies, and Spanish Language History and Literature that will be released this summer. Along with the British Library’s 19th Century app, these new modules will help showcase the platform’s potential and set a bar for quality.

But the app itself is free, and libraries can set their own pricing for the anthologies they create or make them free to patrons of individual library systems or consortia.

Mitchell Davis, Chief Business Officer of BiblioLabs, said that the anthology format could be especially useful for showcasing archived content that would otherwise remain undiscovered by most patrons.

“I think that’s what we’ve been very good at, taking these materials that are ‘lonely’ out in the research world, putting them in creative packaging and making them easy to use,” he said.

For subscription access, pricing begins at $1000 annually for small libraries, and increases based on patron count or student population.

“The library gets the entire tablet distribution ecosystem as part of their subscription,” Davis said. “When a patron downloads the app from their library the first time they identify themselves on the tablet, everything that the library subscribes to is immediately on their tablet and works… There’s no multi-user limits.”