e-Book Reader trial at ADFA

My notes on a webinar I was at by Cathy Burgon on 07/04/2011.

Background
A project was undertaken to review several e-book readers and decide which one to purchase and loan to students. The material on the e-book reader would be determined by the capabilities of the device and the student need at the time.
The e-book reader would need to be able to access:

• Course reading lists online
• E-books from the catalogue in various formats
• The UNSW catalogue through Primo
• Databases via Sirius (UNSW database gateway and authentication system)

The project is still underway and, although they have purchased the devices, they are not currently borrowable to students.

Devices
3 devices were analysed, plus a later analysis of the iPad.
The devices were analysed based on:

• Could they access the following file types?
• PDF with no Digital Rights Management (DRM) and no text (such as digitised chapters from Course Reserve material)
• PDF with DRM (such as material from EBL)
• Online e-books with no software reader required (such as websites, or e-books from Hein Online)
• Online e-books requiring a software reader or applet (such as material from Ebrary)
• EPUB format without DRM (such as those from Project Gutenberg)
• EPUB format with DRM (such as those from ebooks.com)
• Usability?
• Could they connect to ADFA’s wifi to allow access to online materials?

Results

	DreamBook 8 or 10	Dreambook A10	BeBook Neo	iPad
PDF no DRM	Y	Y	Y	N
PDF DRM	Y	Y	Y	Y
View online	Y	Y	N	Y
View online, with applet	N	Y	N	N
EPUB no DRM	Y	Y	Y	Y
EPUB DRM	Y	Y	Y	Y

DreamBook 8 or 10
Operating System: Android
PDF with no DRM: Transferred to device with a USB. Can be read with Adobe Reader (Android version) or other PDF apps.
PDF with DRM: EBL Platform

• Need Adobe Digital Editions on a PC to download the DRM PDF
• Need TXTR installed on the PC to upload the PDF to the DreamBook
• Need TXTR Android Reader installed on the DreamBook
• DreamBook TXTR needs Adobe credentials in its settings
• TXTR Reader can read uploaded DRM PDFs.
• Once set up, this is a very easy process.

View online: Can read on website through the Android browser
View online with software/applet: Ebrary.

• User can only access the quick view on the webpage

DreamBook ePad A10
Operating System: Windows. This device runs exactly the same as a PC.
PDF with no DRM: Transferred to device with a USB or downloaded. Read with Adobe Reader.
PDF with DRM: EBL Platform. Need Adobe Digital Editions on reader to download the DRM PDF.
View online: Can read on website through a browser
View online with software/applet: Ebrary. Latest java update needed to view.
 
BeBook Neo
Operating System: BeBook system.
PDF with no DRM: Transfer to device with a USB
PDF with DRM: EBL Platform

• Need Adobe Digital Editions on a PC to download the DRM PDF
• Need to authorise the BeBook Neo with ADE
• Transfer to device with a USB

View online: Cannot be done (cannot connect to ADFA Wi-Fi)
View online with software/applet: Cannot be done (cannot connect to ADFA Wi-Fi)

iPad
Operating System: iOS
PDF with no DRM: Cannot be read. Unable to just copy files to iPad, connect to a computer and it does not appear as a USB disk. Some time researching did not yield a solution. An IT worker suggested Google Docs but was placed in the too hard basket.
PDF with DRM: EBL Platform

• Need the Bluefire reader
• Purchased from iTunes
• Adobe ID required in settings to read DRM PDFs
• View online: Can read on website through a browser
• View online with software/applet: Ebrary. Items downloaded for Macintosh come in .DMG which will not run on an iPad. User can only access the quick view on the webpage

End Result
The DreamBook A10 was chosen for purchasing. As it was the same as a Windows computer, it was a familiar interface for people and they could begin using it straight away.
ADFA were still working out issues with preventing users from editing the system. As the computer is a Windows-based system, it is easy to make changes. Unfortunately it doesn’t sync with ActiveDirectory, which would help prevent changes.

Social media in and out of the university classroom

My notes on a webinar I was at by Howard Rheingold on 29/03/2011.
Twitter hashtag: #smuni

About Howard Rheingold
Howard is an expert in social media. He initially began teaching social media issues by using social media because there wasn’t much theorising about it going at the university he worked for.
Twitter: @hrheingold
Video Blog: http://vlog.rheingold.com
Website: www.rheingold.com

Background
Howard began teaching using social media in 2006. He used wikis, an e-forum, Drupal blogs and lots of different apps to teach. Using a number of different applications to do something is a very Web 2.0 way of doing things, no single program does everything.
From the initial teaching, feedback complained about the multiple logons and passwords to do anything, and the need to mix and match the media to accomplish tasks.
Howard experimented with Drupal to see if he could design a uniform interface for the products. He entered a competition from HASTAC and won a cash award to pay a Drupal programmer to develop a social media classroom that was free and open source. From this came The Social Media Classroom (www.socialmediaclassroom.com)

The Social Media Classroom
www.socialmediaclassroom.com
The website contains information on how to download and install the Social Media Classroom (which includes a Drupal installation), how to get a hosted installation and instructions on how to use it.
The website links to a number of participatory media lesson plans. Howard attempted to document his teaching so other educators could introduce what he had. His idea for lessons is to build a conversation around topics, not just teach at them during class and then force them to regurgitate during tests.

For teaching using the Social Media Classroom, things like the syllabus and learning expectations are placed into a wiki. This wiki is enhanced by staff.
In 2008 a page was created with chat services for student feedback. Nowadays, twitter is used and chat is considered archaic. The chat page was replaced with a page on mind maps.
The most exciting part of the project was that students were telling each other what was happening with them, and thus they collaborated more. Because of this, there were more opportunities for inquiry and collaborative learning.
Student-centric ideas are not new; there has been a lot of theory around this in the past. Social media has made it much easier to put this theory into practice.
The teaching centres around students inquiring about the facts, rather than just acquiring them.

After asking for feedback on his teaching methods, students said they’d rather do presentations towards the start of semester instead of at the end. Students were deemed ‘co-teachers’ for that lesson. Themes were written up at the start of the course and students were asked to cluster around a particular theme that attracted them. These groups became the ‘co-teaching groups’. He explained that 99% of the course was about cooperation and 1% was about competition.
Each tean was asked to do a 5 minute media presentation that utilised anything except MS Powerpoint.
Co-teaching teams would then make a mindmap of their presentation and this would be presented at the beginning of the next session.
The co-teaching teams would then identify words/phrases in the readings. These would be put into the classroom’s wiki during the class. During the week, everyone was required to fill in the definitions using the wiki. Students were not used to this, as there was no one name on the work. Instead, Howard encouraged the students to look at the discussion and changes pages so that everyone can see what work has been done by whom.
His initial forays into the work were not very successful as he was requiring students to learn and present all the material. Ensuring that students concentrated presentations on one area of learning but contributed to the other areas helped.
The class is not designed to give students a body of knowledge, instead it aims for them to see social media in a number of different ways.
The syllabus is presented on the wiki, as well as in a content map and also as a Presi presentation. Each student has a different way of accessing material and Howard wished them to find their own way to access, understand and use things.
Tests are open to what the student has learnt during the course. All tests are ‘open book’ and computers and the internet are allowed. Each student then writes one of several narratives using as many terms from the wiki and use their own definitions in context.

Problems and issues

• Although each student had a laptop and all could send an SMS without looking at the phone, that doesn’t mean they are well versed in web technologies and social media. Although they could text and used some social media sites like Facebook, a high proportion didn’t know what a wiki was or about blogs.
• Students have limited credibility detection skills. They don’t know if something they view online is from a credible source and it needs to be taught early. All could get an answer to a question, few could verify if that answer was correct, and fewer still knew to find the author and search about them to check if they’re any kind of source.
• The blog post Crap Detection 101 is a good introduction to the issues http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/rheingold/detail?entry_id=42805
• The teacher needs to be as interesting as the entire internet to keep the student’s attention. On the other hand, students need to learn mindfulness about what they’re doing.
  • Howard conducted an experiment whilst teaching one day. He placed a camera at the back of the classroom to record what students were doing.
  • One student watched a video on YouTube that was being presented at the front of the class. He’d rather watch it there than look up at the front. He then switched to looking at Howard’s website, then read his email. This student got very high marks in the class.
  • Multi-tasking research says most people cannot multi-task well, but some students can do this and shouldn’t be excluded because they don’t appear to be concentrating.
• Social media literacies are taught before/after class, not in the classroom.
• Students need to learn about collaboration. Social media relies on collaboration to work effectively.
• We have moved into an age where people carry the internet around with them in cheap devices. Students are learning the different aspects/problems of living in a networked world accidentally (power/reputation/identity/presentation of self). This isn’t being taught well in classes, and people are learning it when things go wrong.
  • e.g. Awareness of privacy implications in Facebook differs greatly in users.
• The technological divide is changing from the have/havenots to the know/knownots. Most can afford a mobile internet device, but not everyone can utilise it to find the information that others can.
• Assessment is difficult to implement but still be easy for a teacher to mark within a timeframe. This is an ongoing problem for Howard, assessment should be about learning. He currently asks students to reflect through an e-portfolio in the Social Media Classroom. This portfolio amalgamates the bookmarks, posts, edits, blog posts, wiki edits and discussion posts into one. Students set a learning goal at the start of the semester and this is analysed to see if it has been achieved.
  Cathy Davidson has done a lot of work on peer assessment. Peer assessment can be work, especially as students will be honest.
  • Contract Grading + Peer Review: Here’s how it works
    
  • Students are used to the ‘banking’ model where they pay attention to stuff that will be on the test and ignore the rest. They need to wake up from this.
• There can be barriers at an institutional level to using non-sanctioned software. There is a natural department between IT departments and innovators. IT are charged with security and support of products.
• Students are not media-savy enough for social networking tools in teaching. Don’t friend students on Facebook until they are ex-students. Boundaries are important.
• Accessibility issues haven’t been a problem for Howard.
• Students think they know everything because they know how to use the devices/programs/technology. But students can write by the time they are 10 years old, that doesn’t mean they don’t have more to learn.
  

Not every teacher in every subject needs to use social media. Teaching with social media takes a lot of time and causes more work. But it is exciting. It can ignite a student’s enthusiasm, and this is a huge payoff for a teacher.

Further sites
Part of Howard's presentation (with captions)

EBL-James Bennett Textbook panel

I attended a discussion a few weeks ago on the possibility of e-textbooks being sold to libraries. Currently publishers will not sell electronic versions of textbooks to libraries because of the significant loss of income it would mean to them. The discussion panel was created so that both librarians and publishers could understand the other point of view in regards to the want and need for this kind of material.

There is a pdf of some of the powerpoint slides presented. I’ve summarised the speakers and issues below (with help from Bee at work).
The crib notes version basically says: “the e-textbook will not happen for a long while as publishers are not prepared to lose that income stream” (Lim, 2011)

Library Speaker 1 – Pam Freeland – University of NSW Library
UNSW have an e-preferred policy. Academic material is finally starting to show up in e-format, but not a lot of it. There are differences in the term ‘textbook’ in each discipline and the JISC study recognises this. The USA is more prescriptive over what goes into a textbook than UK/Australia is. We’ll use anything as long as it has the information we’d like (and is by a recognised group/author, etc).
Various studies have been done. Major ones to watch out for are:
Australia – Quloc study – a large study with 2000+ respondents. Talks about the difficulty with e-texts from a user experience. And most students said they wanted print and e versions of the textbooks.
Australia – Latrobe University study – small group of nursing students. Found that e-books and DRM are confusing and difficult to use for most students.
Overseas studies – she ran out of time here, but mentioned the importance of the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) study from the UK. www.jiscebooksproject.org is their site and they have lots of information.

Library Speaker 2 – Susanne Dowling – Murdoch University Library
Susanne talked about what we do and don’t want in ebooks. Read the pdf to find out these things. Her main argument seemed to be that librarians want e-textbooks more than students do, but students would like the choice.

Library Speaker 3 – Jinny Jones – University of Melbourne Library
Does not have a powerpoint presentation. Jinny spoke about the level of use that textbooks get and the impact this is having on OH&S for staff. Jinny mentioned that they did a survey of 19 titles. These 19 titles had 241 copies held all up in their library. These 19 titles were loaned 13,000 times in a year. That is a significant amount of handling, reshelving, etc. It was very interesting hearing that some libraries (Monash University) can purchase up to 45 copies of a single textbook, so for one textbook item with all 7 day loans, it could possibly be reshelved 10 times in a semester, which is 20 handlings (10 shelving, plus 10 loans). Multiply this by 45 copies and you have 900 times handling the one textbook in a semester. Multiply this by the number of high use items in your short loan area and it is a significant OH&S worry.
If textbooks were to move to an electronic format, that would effectively remove this OH&S problem overnight. Although you’d still need to purchase a limited number of the books, the e-copy would take the bulk of usage.

Publishing Speaker 1 – Elizabeth Weiss – Allen & Unwin
Also does not have a powerpoint presentation. Elizabeth was quite blunt and gave some background on Australian publishing. Australia doesn’t have the large base of users that somewhere like the US does and publishers struggle to make money producing Australian editions of textbooks. If a library buys one e-textbook, the publishers could lose up to 100 sales. This doesn’t sound like a lot but when you only sell 600 copies of a textbook, that’s quite a dent in your profits.
Allen & Unwin sell e-textbooks via ebooks.com but don’t sell many. I wrote that this was probably because it’s not widely advertised, but that’s just my personal view. She also mentioned that many students resist e-texts anyway.

Publishing Speaker 2 – Maryce Johnstone – Gale Cengage Learning
Maryce talked about Gale Cengage’s experiences. She mentioned that although a library would buy up to 40 copies of a physical text, they’ll only buy a single copy of an e-text and expect that it has rights for everyone to use simultaneously and at a similar price to the physical book. This is an unsustainable model for the publishing industry. GaleCengage are trialing with UK publishers and libraries a model where libraries pay a cost somewhere between what the book costs and what the publishers profit would have been (ie between £20 and £10,000). The total cost to a library would never go above £1000. This sounds like a lot, but if you’re a library who buys 45 copies of a $100 textbook, you’re saving money.
The publishers are interested in ways to not lose money like newspapers have. In fact, they’re very worried about the newspaper model which has coloured what people expect to receive online for free. Although they want to provide services to stakeholders, they do need to recoup costs.

Publishing Speaker 3 – Lucy Russell – Wiley
Lucy talked about the costs they want to recoup. She was a figures lady and her presentation was good for me (who is a figures man). Wiley are big enough that they can afford to offer e-textbooks and not lose huge margins. Instead, what they do is provide ‘addons’ to their textbooks. In the US market they must make their textbooks attractive to educational institutions, otherwise they’ll have no profit. Ie First year Psychology textbooks are all very similar, what Wiley do is create online videos, tutorials, exercises, etc that go along with the book and make it more attractive to lecturers. This increases the attractiveness of a book.
Wiley spends between US$50-$200,000 on developing a textbook and up to an extra US$75,000 developing the free addons
For a brand new book:
If there are 1000 students in a course:
Year 1 – 700 units sold (new book with no secondhand copies available)
Year 2 – 400 units sold (as people buy last year’s second hand copy)
Year 3 – 300 units sold (lots of second hand copies now available).
So for a potential of 3000 students, they sell 1400 copies.
$130 new x .909 (GST) x .667 (33% bookstore discount) = $78/copy
Total revenue = US$109,220.
This is the cost we need to make up for that textbook if we offer it free to everyone via e-copy.

ACOC 2010 - Describing resources in a web services world

The Australian Committee on Cataloguing (ACOC) 2010 seminar was held on October 21 at the National Library of Australia. I've summarised each of the talks below.
Papers, presentations and audio are available at http://www.nla.gov.au/lis/stndrds/grps/acoc/papers2010.html

Keynote Address – David Lindahl – eXtensible Catalog
http://www.extensiblecatalog.org/
This very interesting talk focused on an Open Source product called XC or the eXtensible Catalog.

• The development team for his company is made up of an anthropologist who studies librarians and library users, a librarian and an IT expert.
• The software is designed to empower users to study their clients as well as the way they use library systems
• XC is an Open Source catalogue or OPAC which is designed to link in with all major library systems. It has been developed on the Open Source platform ‘Drupal’ and is easily customisable without having to know any coding. It looks similar to what the current EBSCO interface looks like, but as it is easily customisable, it could look like basically anything we wanted. A sample look of the opac is available in the powerpoint presentation.
• Kyushu University has an instance called Cute.Catalog http://search.lib.kyushu-u.ac.jp/catalog/en . A results set showing how a student can limit their result is available at http://search.lib.kyushu-u.ac.jp/catalog/en/xc_browse/search/7/%20%28murder%29%20_rows%3A%2820%29?search_type=browse
• XC also provides a ‘Metadata Services Toolkit’ module which presents a faceted browse/search of problems with data. It was very interesting in that it could pick up various coding problems and then tell you similar records with the problems. You could then use the facets to see if there was a particular ‘theme’ amongst these problem records so you could perform mass changes. The facets also helped visually view problems such as spelling errors.
  

Cataloguing in a ‘Discovery Layer’ world – Karen Stone – State Library of Queensland (SLQ)

Karen talked about ‘Discovery Layers’, a single source/page/search engine that will search across lots of library holdings. An example would be SerialsSolutions which searches across a number of our database platforms (although they aren’t as seemless as some others).

• SLQ implemented OneSearch from Primo (I think). She talked about their experiences.
• Mentioned that data quality is important when implementing a platform like this, all kinds of coding errors stood out (very obviously).
• Mentioned problems when having local solutions that were non-standard, such as coding a set of databases in a certain non-standard way which caused them all to be displayed as ‘books’ in the system. Also mentioned not performing changes on old records when major areas changed (ie when the form subdivision in subjects changed from $x to $v).
• There are ways of finding such things in the local system and doing mass changes, but these are very time consuming.
• She also mentioned that the TAFE libraries in Qld would never be able to do this due to what they include in their catalogue data, but that SLQ had a history of high quality data and this was essential for successful use of this program.
• The entire talk questioned whether we should catalogue things differently to work with a discovery layer, but her opinion was that we should catalogue correctly and to standards in the first place and that things will work out.

Making the most of your metadata, and cataloguing in a web services world – Monica Szunejko – State Library of Western Australia (SLWA)

A rather ‘interesting’ talk on having your users contribute catalogue records. I could feel the tension in the room as people listened to her. I thought it had merit though.

• Library catalogues are not where people go for information because it is out of date and the terminology is bad. Also mentioned that no thesaurus is neutral and that our library catalogues are filled with loaded terminology, so why not embrace this and use common terminology instead of our unwieldy thesauri?
• SLWA have created a site where their users can catalogue their ‘artefacts’ directly into the system. They fill out a form, select some dropdowns and tada a marc record is created in the background. Use of extensive notes fields combined with URLs to link pictures to catalogue records.
• Shown an example of someone who uploaded 6 personal photos in a series and annotated what the photos were about. The annotations showed ‘voice’ and depth to the information that would have been lost if catalogued by a librarian.
• Interesting example of people powered cataloguing of indigenous artefacts at www.irititja.com
  

From container to context: how cataloguers can drive a fundamental and necessary change in resource description – Kent Fitch – National Library of Australia (NLA)

Another ‘interesting’ talk, this one on the uselessness of LCSH and other major thesauri out there. Less tension as he was incredibly amusing, but still quite controversial.

• Search engines are wonderful because they allow users to type random words in a box and receive help.
• Google pre-empts the search of a user (as if by magic) and that’s what library users are beginning to expect. Google also answers simple questions quickly, but doesn’t do so well with the more complex questions. Library catalogues are worse at it (if you are looking at the slideshow, see the pages on railways society mid west nineteenth century
• Library catalogues need to increase what’s in their catalogues.
• Presented findings from a paper by Cory Doctorow in 2001 who said that metadata was metacrap, due to:
• People lie
• People are lazy
• People are stupid
• Mission: Impossible (aka people lie, are lazy and stupid)
• Schemas aren’t neutral
• Metrics influence results
• There’s more than one way to describe something
  
• Showed examples of a book having 4 subjects in a library catalogue, 7 in Wikipedia, 40 tags in LibraryThing and 29 tags in Amazon (plus reviews, plus references to citations), then google scholar had references to even more citations
• What do we do? Stay in our small insular world with LCSH and RDA or expand and embrace new things (tagging/open source/having clients do descriptions)

RDA Update session – Deirdre Kiorgaard – NLA

• No plan for a national licence of RDA
• RDA records may begin appearing on OCLC soon, we need to watch out for them
• Training materials for RDA will all be on the ACOC website at http://www.nla.gov.au/lis/stndrds/grps/acoc/rda.html
• RDA implementation has been pushed back until second quarter 2012.
• NZ cataloguer’s wiki will also have some information – http://nznuc-cataloguing.pbwiki.com/RDA-page
  

Koha and Kete non-English implementations – Irma Birchall – CALYX Information Essentials

Koha is an open source library management system, Kete is a commercial addon for Koha

• CALYX have integrated Google Translate into an opac. Standard Koha allows you to customise the interface to be in different languages, but this doesn’t alter the catalogue data. The Google Translate widget allows the full details to be translated (by machine) including all bibliographic information.
• Example is Emmaus Bible College’s catalogue at http://library.emmaus.edu.au/ - they joined with a Korean school and this allows some level of usage by the 100% Korean speaking students
• Very easy to embed a widget with Koha and this was demonstrated
• Also mentioned Forvo, this is a translation pronunciation tool. Native speakers record themselves saying a particular word, and then it can be embedded into catalogue records. Alliance Francais’ catalogue has this feature in some parts of it.
  

Using the library as a central repository for the parent organisation – Sharron Zuodar – University of South Australia (UniSA)

Sharron proposed advertising library services to the parent institutions such as:

• Inventory control for the AV department
• Software tracking for IT
  • Create brief bib records for software
  • Use fields to represent usage
  • Loan it out to IT staff if they have it so it’s easily traceable
• Registering copyright material (ie docuteck)
  • Create bib records containing all needed data
  • Ie illustrations/length/pagination
  • Ensure it is standard
  • Easily pulled out for reports at audit time
• Photography department
  • Inventory
  • Asset control
  • Holdings are suppressed from display
  • Records photography equipment as well as an inventory of important photograph collections held
• Artwork department
  • Register artworks (ie create bibs)
  • Link to pictures
  • Have locations for which stores they are in or where they are being displayed
  • No accessible opac due to copyright of images
• Talked about supporting the parent institution in whatever they need to do as the library has the skills and software needed.
  

Web transaction log analysis – Brad Cummings – Music section of the NLA

Brad talked about analysing web transaction logs to work out what a user of the system has been doing. This is a project the NLA is working on and they are not finished.

• The NLA collects multiple logs (catalogue, web, content, user database) so this makes it difficult to track things
• Once you screen out all the noise (downloading images, requesting style sheets, search engine crawlers) you are left with quite specific data on what a user has done
• Can work out where they’ve come from, what they’ve clicked on, types of searches they’ve done, if they’ve been to other parts of the website, sometimes even where they’ve gone to
• When aggregated can see what users are commonly clicking on (or never clicking on).
• It involves a lot of work and a high level of experience in coding.
  

Recent developments in cataloguing/marc – Catherine Argus – NLA

• Multilingual dictionary of cataloguing terms and concepts has been developed (I didn’t see by whom, sorry)
• 008/23 and 008/29 have new fields for electronic resources to describe databases vs websites
• Cookery subject heading has gone (YAY!) to be replaced by cooking. See www.loc.gov/catdir/cpso/h1475.html (Kath sent an update about this but I must have missed it, it is very exciting for me coming from a public library background).
• Library of Congress Genre and Form Thesaurus has been created. This will go in to 655 #7 |aFORM HEADING|2lcgft . These will be authorised headings for the format of items, instead of the free text 655 that most people seem to use.
  

Recent developments in cataloguing/Dewey – Anne Robertson – Australian representative Dewey Decimal Committee

• DDC 23 is being released mid next year. It will be tangerine in colour
• Major changes to law (340) and religions (200).
• Law has been changed to reflect differences in European vs British vs Australian vs US law. Updates to areas that have common terms that don’t mean common things.
• Religion will have some changes to Islam currently, but a supplement will be released after DDC23 incorporating major major changes such as equalising the number schedule to include all major religions and removing the huge Christian bias.