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 | Latest ebrary Survey Measures Students’ Attitudes to Ebooks
Ebook provider ebrary this week released its third survey in two years of attitudes toward ebooks, this one measuring students’ perception and use of the emerging medium. Completed this May, the survey reveals few major surprises for librarians, confirming the continuing rise of web-based resources in students’ lives—and also suggests that the book on the book is not closed when it comes to print. “Print books still command respect,” noted Allen McKiel, dean of library and media services at Western Oregon University.
In fact, a passion for print books emerged from the survey. That surprised McKiel, who has analyzed all of the recent ebrary surveys. “Lack of interest is perhaps too mild a characterization for the reaction that some students have to ebooks,” McKiel noted in his analysis. “The loss of print books is personal. Books are loved. Ebooks threaten them. I think it is important to acknowledge that for many students, faculty, and librarians, perhaps most acutely for librarians, e-books threaten the loss of something approximating the loss of a personal friend.”
Nevertheless, librarians clearly remain the ebook’s best friend. Librarians (50%) were most often selected as introduction points for students to ebooks, followed by the library catalog (44%) and the library web site (44%). Some 77% of respondents said they usually access ebooks through the library web site—although, notably, and lending weight to a recent LJ article on the subject, students were as likely to find ebooks through Google (55%) as they were through the library catalog.
The survey garnered a hefty 6,492 responses, from freshmen through doctoral students. Overall, the uptake of ebooks is clearly on the rise, however, a significant number of students remain uninitiated. Although 57% of students acknowledged that their libraries had ebooks (only 9% said their library did not), a full third (33%) said they did not know the library had them. McKiel explained that the number of students unaware of ebook holdings corresponded to last year’s ebrary survey, which found that 37% of libraries had less than 1000 ebooks, and suggested a correlation. “The likelihood of stumbling onto ebooks in the catalog with fewer than 1,000 ebooks is low,” he wrote. “Similarly, instruction from an institution with so few ebooks would not address the topic.”
Still, about half of students (49%) said they never use ebooks, a finding that rippled throughout the survey’s result. Those students suggested a range of reasons: 57% indicated they did not know where to find them; 17% said that their library
did not offer them; and nearly half of those students reporting that they “never” used
ebooks indicated they simply preferred print books. These students were directed to skip a portion of the survey—and that rippled throughout the survey, skewing some results. For example, when asked about online resource usage, ebooks (78%) rated a strong second behind Google (81%) and ebook usage surprisingly rated on par with print book usage in libraries. “The loss of the non-ebook user perspective explains this result,” McKiel observed, adding that in his experience, ebook usage “corresponds to a rate of about half of print book usage when their circulation is viewed relative to their percent of the collection.”
Among those who use ebooks, it is clear that functionality is valued. Some 87% cited searching as important; followed by anytime, anywhere access (86%) and the ability to download to a laptop (80%). Users also had a message for ebook providers: an overwhelming 81% said they needed more titles in their subject areas, and copyright concerns aside, insisted that more functionality—such as no restrictions on printing, cutting and pasting, and emailing text—was important. “These restrictions may prevent some copyright violations; however, they are also responsible for some of the most severe feelings about the usability of ebooks.”
In the larger scope, the survey further confirmed a lot of online behavior among students that will come as no surprise to libraries: Google is dominant among student searchers; Wikipedia has “arrived as a tool of choice”; and e-reference works such as dictionaries and encyclopedias are “established self-help reference.” While e-journal and database usage for students (65% and 62%, respectively) lags behind faculty usage (86% and 76%, respectively), students are becoming more and more immersed in social networking online. What may be surprising is that the book—print or electronic—does not seem to be losing ground so precipitously in the surging digital world.
“It is noteworthy that e-books are just behind Google as an important format for students,” McKiel concludes. “It is a hint of evidence suggesting that the format may endure in the context of the Internet.”
The full survey can be accessed here. Registration is required.
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Univ. of Calgary Is First in Canada To Establish Open Access “Authors Fund”
In another example of the increasing number of collaborative open access funding experiments, University of Calgary (UC) professors and graduate students will now have access to a $100,000 Open Access Authors Fund. The fund, announced this week by Thomas Hickerson, vice-provost for libraries and cultural resources and
university librarian, is the first in Canada. Under the program, UC faculty and graduate students can apply to receive funds to help pay author processing fees associated with open access journals. Rose Goldstein, UC’s VP for research, said the establishment of the fund would be “a crucial development for our faculty and graduate students.”
The program is similar to pilot projects in the U.S.. Through the University of California, Berkeley’s Research Impact Initiative, faculty who wish to publish in open access journals can apply for up to $3000 to cover costs. The pilot stage of that project, launched in January 2008, will last 18 months—or until the initial $125,000 allocated to the fund runs out, with the goal of making the fund permanent.
At least two other U.S. universities have established such open access support. The University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill has launched a modest $10,000 fund, offering awards of up to $1000 per article, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has put forth $50,000 from the library’s gift fund. Both programs are detailed, in a recent SPARC newsletter.
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| Napster-Like Battle? AP Seeks To Limit Bloggers’ Use of Its Content
The Associated Press (AP) has apparently backed off what its own officials called a series of “heavy-handed” legal demands that its headlines and lead paragraphs be removed from a popular blog. But despite a legal détente in this case, the conflict is poised to ramp up with a set of guidelines hint at what could become a thorny digital copyright issue over fair use—and a complicated new legal front—for bloggers and news gathering sites on the Internet.
According to the New York Times, the AP demanded that a blog, the Drudge Retort (a blog name playing off the infamous Internet pioneer Drudge Report), remove ten posts “that quoted between 40 and 80 words of its articles.” Late last week, however, after an uproar on the web, the AP said it had come to an accord with Rogers Cadenhead, publisher of the Drudge Retort. Although AP officials settled with Cadenhead the organization said it planned to release “guidelines” for bloggers using AP content. AP officials declined to elaborate to reporters on the settlement with Cadenhead.
On his blog, Workbench, however, Cadenhead said that the larger questions raised by the AP’s concern with blog practices remained unresolved. “I’m glad that my personal legal dispute with the AP is resolved,” he posted, “but [the settlement] does nothing to resolve the larger conflict between how AP interprets fair use and how thousands of people are sharing news on the web.” While also declining to elaborate on his conversations with AP lawyers, Cadenhead, ominously, wrote that “if AP’s guidelines end up like the ones they shared with me, we’re headed for a Napster-style battle on the issue of fair use.”
Cadenhead added said he was offered assistance from the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Public Citizen, and the Stanford Fair Use Project. While he acknowledged the disruption to established businesses like the AP, he suggested that bloggers and fair use advocates seize the opportunity at hand to develop their own standards—and to push for them. “AP sells headline and lead-only services to customers. Asking the company to concede there's a way people can share this information for free is like asking the RIAA to pick its favorite file-sharing client,” he quipped. “It’s incumbent upon bloggers and our $500-an-hour friends in the legal community to define our own guidelines and fight for them. If we don’t, big media companies will eventually define them for us.”
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| SPARC Announces Lineup for 2008 Institutional Repository Conference
SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition) this week announced the keynote speakers for its Digital Repositories Meeting 2008, to be held in Baltimore, MD, November 17-18. The international gathering, organized by SPARC in cooperation with SPARC Europe, will explore an increasingly hot topic in academic libraries: how open online archives hosted by universities, colleges, and government agencies “can enhance their service to scholars, institutions, and the public.”
The opening keynote address will be given by John Wilbanks, VP for science at Creative Commons and director of the Science Commons program. He will be followed the next day by Bob Witeck, CEO and co-founder of Witeck-Combs Communications, a marketing communications and public relations agency in Washington, DC. David Shulenburger, VP for academic affairs at the National Association of State University and Land-Grant Colleges, will close the meeting with “a public policy perspective on the emerging role of open digital repositories.”
Invited speakers include will also include: Sayeed Choudhury (Johns Hopkins University, USA), Rea Devakos (University of Toronto T-Space, Canada), Norbert Lossau (Goettingen State and University Library and DRIVER, Germany), Bernard Rentier (University of Liege, Belgium), and Syun Tutiya (Chiba University, Japan). Additional speakers will be selected from submitted proposals.
To register for meeting, visit the conference web site.
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| LJ Seeks Nominations for Second Annual GOLD BOOK Service Awards
Let that special vendor know how much you love them! Winners will be honored with a reception at ALA Midwinter, in Denver.
Your library has a lot of accounts with vendors of every sort. You pay good money for materials, supplies and services. Does anyone give you great service, over and above the expected? If so, now is your chance to let them know how much they are appreciated. Library Journal encourages you to nominate professionals who help you the most. All entrants will be considered for the second annual GOLD BOOK Service Awards. The winners will be profiled in the August edition of the all-new GOLD BOOK (formerly the Buyer’s Guide). They will also be honored at a special reception at ALA Midwinter in Denver. If your nominees are selected, you will be invited too!
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Library Journal Academic Newswire
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