Over 3,000 e-book titles are to be made available to further education colleges, Anna Vernon, programme manager for the JISC E-books for FE project told a meeting of the London and South East Circle of CoFHE at CILIP headquarters in London today. After an extensive consultation with library and learning resource centre staff in colleges, the contract will go to eBrary. eBrary had the highest number of matches with titles prioritised by colleges, and also offer resources of interest to smaller specialist colleges; Anna illustrated this by reference to a lambing textbook which is part of the deal.
The deal will go live in May and run for five years and it's important that library and learning resource centres embed the e-books in electronic learning environments. The JISC e-books observatory project found that e-books are twice as likely to be used if linked to within VLEs. Our task now is to use them and promote them.
Nathan Newey, Technical Services Manager at the University of East London, presented a case study of UEL's implementation of e-books, using multiple platforms.
