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Technically Speaking
Library consultant for the Lincoln Trail Libraries System in Champaign, Illinois. Column for January 2002 EbraryJust at the time when NetLibrary is filing for bankruptcy and being rescued from oblivion by OCLC’s announced intentions to purchase its assets, and when Questia continues to bypass libraries by marketing—unsuccessfully, it appears—its e-book services directly to students, Ebrary is on the eve of entering the library market with its own brand of e-book services. Chris Warnock, the founder of Ebrary, has been moving cautiously with regard to libraries, but is now ready to launch a concerted marketing effort aimed at promoting library use of Ebrary services. Unlike NetLibrary, which until now has charged libraries a one-time fee of 150% of the cost of the hard-copy print edition in exchange for perpetual access to each “copy” purchased, Ebrary will be offering access to its entire collection of titles and to its entire suite of services for an annual license fee. The company has 26,000 titles under contract, over 4,000 of which are currently available. Ebrary’s services include accounting and reporting tools; full-text searching; annotation, highlighting, and bookmark-ing capabilities; and MARC records with URLs linking to the full-text content on a cobranded Web page unique to the library or consortia leasing the service. The purpose of giving each library customer access to a unique cobranded Web page is to enable Ebrary to offer library-specific (or more accurately, catalog-specific) statistical data on the use of its titles, both to libraries and publishers. The MARC records Ebrary will provide to its customers have also been entered into OCLC (without the library-specific URL). Although access to the content is unlimited once the annual fee is paid, Ebrary will still charge end users for copying and printing portions of content. When Ebrary first announced its e-book pricing model, its primary income was slated to come from micropayments for copying and printing the content; but this pricing model was abandoned as being too problematic, and has now been replaced by an annual license fee. Actual prices will be available at the ALA Midwinter Meeting in New Orleans this month when the company plans to formally introduce the product. The ability to link words and phrases of e-book content to services selected by the user is part of the Ebrary suite of services, but the actual links will be determined by the services subscribed to by the library. The company’s linking strategy seems to be in line with what many other content providers are pursuing, but for the moment Ebrary is using a proprietary protocol rather than embracing the OpenURL protocol (see below). Ebrary has pledged, however, to integrate its linking middleware to the OpenURL-based linking middleware that library vendors and information providers are now widely deploying, so that Ebrary services can be a target for links from other information providers. For more information, see www.ebrary.com. OpenURL Gains MomentumIf I had to vote for the most all-around politically correct word of the last several years, my choice would be “open.” What reasonable person could be against any of the myriad ideas and concepts suggested by the word “open”? Probably only Bill Gates, and he is the head of Microsoft, the most politically incorrect company on the planet. OpenURL, a communications standard that supports middleware services with multiple context-sensitive links, gained popularity when it was promoted by Ex Libris through its SFX initiative and has really opened up a lot of linking activity this past year. It’s so hot it even has its own theme song; and the NISO OpenURL Committee has voted to adopt a submitted draft of the protocol as version 0.1 of the standard. Some companies have already been using the same draft specification that is on the SFX Web site. Eric Hellman, president of Openly Informatics, is passionate about the value of a widely used linking standard. “You can get the stuff you’ve paid for, not necessarily the stuff that the provider has done deals for,” he said. Openly Informatics markets a suite of software tools that uses the OpenURL standard (as well as XML and RDF) and recently announced 1CATE (one Click Access to Everything) Adapter, a tool for using the CrossRef linking system in CrossRef Affiliate Libraries. CrossRef is an organization of publishers supporting a system that links citations to journal content. Libraries can use the CrossRef system by becoming affiliate libraries, which costs $500 per library per year. Endeavor Information Systems announced it will be incorporating Openly Informatics’ Link Openly software into its LinkFinderPlus product. OCLC has announced that FirstSearch users who also have OpenURL linking servers can now display their OpenURL links with any citation in any FirstSearch database using text or icons of their choice. “This new option for libraries saves time for users because it allows them to link from citations in FirstSearch databases to corresponding full-text articles in other library-provided resources,” said OCLC Vice President of Marketing and Planning Frank Hermes. The connection from FirstSearch to the library’s OpenURL server is established in the FirstSearch administrative module, and can be disabled on a database level. Gale Group recently adopted the OpenURL protocol as well, and John Barnes, Gale’s senior vice president of product management, hailed it as “a significant milestone in the evolution of electronic reference because it addresses a fundamental problem with electronic databases—they operate independently of each other. A library may have developed a great research collection using a variety of vendors’ databases, but if they aren’t tied to one another, their value is significantly diminished.” Contracts and Agreements
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By David Dorman