WorldCat Local and Electronic Resources

One of our biggest frustrations with WorldCat Local has been the difficulties involved in surfacing e-book collections. The standard way of adding an ebook set to your catalog--uploading a file of MARC records provided by the vendor--doesn't surface records in WCL.

To get records for an e book set in WCL, you need to add records to your local ILS catalog, make sure those records have OCLC numbers in them and have your holdings set on the corresponding records in OCLC. This can be hard to achieve if vendor provided record sets don't have OCLC numbers on them to start with.

OCLC has an initiative in place to get vendor supplied MARC records into WorldCat, but agreements are not in place for all vendors and the process is somewhat cumbersome. Also, as I understand it, in some cases these vendor record sets aren't truly in WorldCat, they just show up in certain WorldCat Local instances where the library subscribes to the ebook collection. Effectively, this is creating "shadow" records in WorldCat that are only available to certain subscribers.

I really wish that we could just flip on and off collections of ebooks in WCL in the same way that one adds and removes collections of e journals in Serials Solutions' management interface. Having to load records into a local system and worry about connecting those records to OCLC records is a big hassle. I realize that there may be some vendor licensing issues that prevent this, but this seems like a good goal.

Perhaps there could be some kind of connection between Serials Solutions and OCLC along the same lines as their e serials holdings project that would achieve this sort of ease in adding and removing e book sets.

Another question to ask within the e book arena: why are we so dependent on vendors for bibliographic records? Libraries should be able to collectively catalog e book sets, especially in cases where the vendors want to hold their records tightly to their chest. Some kind of crowdsourcing application for cataloging an entire e book set might achieve this. Any libraries who want records for a certain e book set sign up, and the app divvies up cataloging between them.

Economist on Google Books

The Economist has a leader supporting the Google Books Deal, and an interview with Paul Courant, Dean of Libraries at Univ. of Michigan.



He talks some about the product that Google will be offering to libraries with this deal.

I have to wonder if this product will be the watershed moment for e books in academic libraries. If Google's library of books is big and broad enough to serve as a general library on its own, Google's platform for e books could become the place to do research in books.

Much of its success will depend on how much current content is in their index, and this is really dependent on Google doing deals with thousands of publishers. If Google's index is largely made up of older scanned books, it'll be a useful research tool, but not compelling as place for general research.

Google might become the place to do research in books, whereas recreational e book reading will happen through other vendors like Amazon.

What I did for my summer vacation

Our library picked up an Amazon Kindle for staff to try out, and I brought it on our family vacation to Manzanita on the Oregon Coast a couple weeks ago.

Let me give you some of my thoughts on it. My first impression was that it was kind of awkward to navigate. The little joysticky thing that functions as a mouse isn't all that intuitive. I kept wanting it to be like an iPhone/iTouch with a larger screen.

Once I figured out how to navigate content, I liked reading on it. The very simple presentation of text is refreshing. It eliminates the distractions of a PC operating system and really lets you concentrate on the text. The e ink technology works well, though I do wish it could illuminate itself in the dark. It is slim and fits into a beach bag as easily as any paper back, though I popped it in a ziplock to keep out the sand.

I found myself navigating around the Amazon store some, reading samples of various books. Having this limited body of content to chose from--just books with a recreational bent, as opposed to the whole web--felt kind of relaxing. Sort of like I was in another limited media environment like a movie theater or flipping channels on TV. (I know it has a web browser built in, but I avoided it because I was on vacation.)

After I got back from vacation and was preparing for a class that I'm teaching on digital libraries, I decided to download a couple PDF reports to the Kindle, just to check out how they would work. (I had assigned a few reports for students to read and needed to read them fully for myself.) I used Stanza to convert them to Kindle format.

It was nice to go out in the backyard and hang out on the hammock and do the reading on the Kindle as opposed to my laptop.

The Kindle is a nice device for concentrated reading in the same way that a big flatscreen TV is a nice device for watching a feature length movie.

In some ways, I wish it wasn't even connected to the network. That way there would be even fewer distractions.

In other ways, I wish it was an iPhone with a bigger screen.

on e books

Our library is dipping its toes into e-books. It's a complex world. A small academic library has a few options for providing e books:

1. Public domain e books from Project Gutenberg, Google Books, etc.
2. Licensed packages of ebooks paid with a yearly fee
   
3. E book aggregators that sell books by the title, the big ones being EBrary and EBL

This is a good discussion of academic library options regarding e book purchasing.

I'm most comfortable with the licensing option because it doesn't seem like as long term of a commitment as paying full price or more to purchase permanent rights to individual titles on a potentially questionable platform. We recently licensed the ACLS Humanities e book collection and are trialing the Safari digital library and the EBrary platform.

Safari is a good example of providing e book content in a way that makes sense for the web. It is surprisingly pleasant to use. All book content is browse-able as HTML web pages and there are links between relevant sections of materials. Books may be downloaded via PDF and used on mobile devices. New titles in the library are available via RSS feed. It seems like the content used was designed from the ground up to be navigated digitally.

Ebrary presents itself as a clunky web interface plus a reader plug-in that lets you do various things to the book like cut and paste, notes, etc. Seems like sort of a "walled garden" approach. This doesn't strike me as very practical or realistic. It's unlikely that patrons are going to adopt research habits that take advantage of a subset of features only available on some electronic content. Ebrary books feel like old fashioned books shoe-horned into an electronic interface. EBrary has titles from many academic publishers that are availalbe to purchase at full price from library book vendors like Yankee and Blackwell.

The ACLS collection also has a somewhat clunky interface, but at least they are not pushing you to download a reader. It looks somewhat JSTOR inspired. Weirdly, you can download books in PDF format, but only in 5 page chunks. You can also see the plain text, but in a hard to read format.

The Google Books interface has a nice way of flipping between the scanned image and the plain text and is also generally pleasant to use considering it's working with mostly analog-derived content.

Unsurprisingly, the library sector vendors are behind the curve in user interface design. I don't think our patrons will have much sympathy for this.

I hope that we can eventually buy all our e books so that they may be used in a best-of-breed interface. I'm also hoping that we can leverage our regional consortium's buying power with e book packages and individual e books. Right now, purchasing an e book for our library is a bummer because it provides no broader benefit to the consortium collection. A shared e book collection is on the Orbis Cascade Alliance Strategic Agenda, I'm told.