National e-book project calls for community involvement

Earlier this year the Jisc national e-books observatory project began its
work to license collections of e-books that are core texts for UK HE,
focusing on Engineering, Medicine, Media studies and Business and
Management.

Jisc is funding publishers to make available a selection of their core
e-books to all UK HE institutions free for the next two years. 

Having received a number of proposals from publishers and aggregators,
the project now needs the views of librarians, lecturers and others to
identify which e-books are core texts and which will best support students
and has begun a consultation process to elicit these views.

Project manager Caren Milloy explained why community involvement was so
important to the project: ‘The key to this project is making a critical
mass of e-books available for two years so that we can analyse in depth the
use of those resources in four key subject areas. We want to license the
best and most useful e-books so that we can create a core collection in
each subject area, and for that we need to get the views of the education
community. We hope that as many people as possible give us their views.’

To take part in the consultation please go to: e-books consultation