Ebook Summit Focuses on Patron Driven Acquisition, Discovery, and Marketing Ebooks to Students

"Ebooks: The New Normal," a virtual summit hosted by Library Journal and School Library Journal, will take place October 12, from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. The first virtual Ebook Summit drew participants from over 435 academic libraries in the United States and Canada.

The summit includes separate tracks for academic, public, and school libraries, a report on ebook penetration in each of these sectors, an opening panel on leveraging the ebook opportunity in libraries (featuring John Palfrey from the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University), exhibits, a keynote by the National Book Award winning author M.T Anderson, and a lively closing pecha kucha fest featuring a half dozen authors..

The academic-focused panels include "Mastering the Transition: Patron Driven Acquisition and Ebook Discovery," moderated by Sue Polanka, who blogs at No Shelf Required about the issues surrounding ebooks for librarians and publishers. Among the panelists are Scott Anderson, an associate professor of librarianship at Millersville University, PA; Nancy Gibbs, head of acquisitions at Duke University Libraries; Smita Joshipura, electronic resources management coordinator at Arizona State University; and George Machovec, interim executive director at the Colorado Alliance of Research Libraries.

The second panel, "Marketing Ebooks to Student," will address research on student success and how librarians can position their ebook collections to match the real-life work habits of students. Moderated by Josh Hadro, LJ executive editor for digital products, the panel includes Barbara Fister, a reference librarian at Gustavus Adolphus College in St. Peter, MN, a contributor to ACRLog, and author of LJ's Peer to Peer Review column for the LJ Academic Newsire; Joseph Sanchez, instructional design librarian for the University of Colorado Denver and the former director at Red Rocks Community College in Lakewood, CO; and Maria Savova, a collection development and special projects librarian at McGill University Library.

Registration for the summit is still open.