E-books Are Here to Stay – Are We Ready?

Abstract

The goal of this one-hour participative session will be to build upon the momentum of the recent Scholars Portal Day sessions on e-books at the OCUL level, and to improve and widen our own local context regarding e-books. To meet this goal, we will provide participants with a quick “crash course” in the current state of e-book publishing and collection-building. In order to truly emphasize the power of consortial sharing and learning, we have invited four local experts (TUG staff members) to give a "lighting talk" on each of the following areas:

Carol Stephenson (WLU, OCUL Projects Officer) will speak about publishing trends Pauline Dewan (WLU) will speak about collection development Christine Jewell (UW) will speak about access and discovery Pam Jacobs (UG) will speak about evaluation

We will ask speakers to limit their talks to 5-7 minutes each, and to focus on the major trends in these areas, and the implications of these trends for OCUL and TUG. Each talk will be followed by a facilitated (large-group) brainstorming session to generate discussion about the local implications of trends identified by the speaker i.e. things we should be paying attention to, the implications of e-books for joint collection building and resource sharing, and how TUG might be able to work collaboratively to address the challenges and opportunities presented by the advent of e-books as a quickly-emerging format. To end the session, we will have a final 2 minute capstone summary by Gohar Ashoughian, University Librarian at WLU, to precis what we all will have heard/learned during the preceding hour. The session will, we hope, demonstrate in a very tangible way the kind of applied, nimble learning that is possible when peer-to-peer learning within TUG is supported and encouraged, and the results (if useful) will be shared with the TUG IR group.