E-book platforms
Project MUSE. The UPCC Book Collections promise over 14,000 titles from 66 university press and scholarly publishers. ‘End users want an integrated experience
– MUSE is already a “go to” source for many – and library customers have been asking for some time that MUSE content expand to books,’ explained Melanie Schaffner, director of sales and marketing for the organisation in a recent presentation about the project.
Search and discovery One of the key benefi ts promised to researchers of such platforms is the increased ease they should have in discovering content. ‘MUSE’s new integrated search engine
will default to searching all book and journal content currently available on our platform. Search results clearly indicate which full- text content is accessible to users via their library. Users will be able to view only book results or only journal results, and to limit the results to only content to which they have full-text access,’ says Project MUSE. In addition, MUSE will make metadata fi les available for its digital books to abstracting, indexing, and discovery services. ‘Users no longer necessarily go to the
library catalogue. We’re paving the way for them to have multiple routes to content,’ commented Beebe of OUP. ‘Keywords and abstracts are free on the open web so users can go in through Google. They can search across all the platform’s content and all the presses are given equal weight.’
Differentiation and integration Preserving the individual natures of the presses is also important. ‘We have dedicated partner press home pages. It’s great to put everything together but also important that each has their own identity,’ said Beebe. Andrew Brown, director of academic publishing at Cambridge University Press, commenting at the launch of the new Cambridge platform, agreed: ‘A key concept of University Publishing Online is to preserve the individual identity of each of its publishing partners, as every academic press makes a unique contribution to the world of scholarship through its own particular process of selecting, editing and presenting material.’ Alongside efforts to differentiate between
the presses on each platform, integration goes beyond searching across the monographs from different presses. The ability to search across not just books but also electronic
www.researchinformation.info
FEATURE
presses is a signifi cant undertaking but we’ve already done it for our own content so we are familiar with the challenges.’ ‘XML makes it easier for libraries to put content into their catalogue,’ he continued. ‘And if you have XML you can deliver it as HTML, PDF of whatever. We are really content type neutral, which is especially important when talking about accessing the platform from mobile devices.’ Project MUSE is also talking about mobile
Hannah Perrett
journals and other content is an important feature that some projects are emphasising. ‘The search facility also encompasses Cambridge Journals Online (Cambridge’s journals platform), providing users with access to hundreds of the latest academic, research-rich publications,’ noted Hannah Perrett of Cambridge University Press. Speaking about Books at JSTOR, Laura
Brown, JSTOR managing director, explained: ‘Delivering deeply linked, vital scholarly research to libraries, scholars, and students worldwide is our number one goal. We are laying the foundation for a collaboration that will offer a transformative integration of book and journal literature that can enable new models for scholarly communication in the future.’
Formats and mobile plans For OUP, one of the key features being discussed is the use of XML. ‘One of the main benefi ts of our platform is that it is XML based. That’s given us immediate advantage in terms of keywords and discoverability and we’ve been working with partner presses to get their content to XML,’ commented Beebe of OUP. ‘Converting to XML for university
plans. ‘MUSE books will be accessible on any mobile device with a web browser and the capability to open PDF fi les, such as the iPhone or iPad. We are currently in the process of developing a new interface for mobile devices that will improve a user’s experience when searching and retrieving MUSE content on mobile devices, and expect this interface to be in place by the time MUSE/UPCC book collections are available,’ says the organisation.
The business With so many resources being brought together on several platforms, potential partner presses and customers will be eager to know how the content can be purchased. ‘Each press has a contract with us. Each is different but they all get percentages of the sales,’ said Beebe of OUP. ‘Customers can buy content from individual presses or subject collections.’ The models are similar for the other platforms too, with a range of collections of frontlist and archival content available. The number of university presses that have
already signed up to one or several of these initiatives reveals a strong level of interest in bringing this content together. And they are not mutually exclusive of each other or the presses’ existing sales channels, both directly and sometimes through aggregators. ‘From the beginning we’ve said it will be on exclusive. Our argument is that you wouldn’t put all your books in one bookstore,’ said Beebe of OUP.
FURTHER INFORMATION
University Press Scholarship Online (Oxford University Press)
www.universitypressscholarship.com
University Publishing Online (Cambridge University Press)
www.universitypublishingonline.org
University Press Content Consortium (Project MUSE)
muse.jhu.edu
Books at JSTOR
about.jstor.org/books
DEC 2011/JAN 2012 Research Information 25
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