Procuring E-Books for the Virtual Learning Environment

This paper discusses the explosion in the use of electronic resources by students and the development of e-books. The existing high usage will be intensified as virtual learning environments become the primary means of interaction between students and universities. A brief outline of university library procurement in the UK is given, followed by an analysis of a recent ground-breaking tender for e-books for higher education libraries in the UK. The continuing development of a bespoke subject collection of e-books for nursing students is explored in some detail. Student Use of Electronic Resources The overwhelming popularity of e-resources has long been recognised. Morse and Clintworth (2000, p.3), reporting on electronic journal use in an academic health science library, record an overwhelming preference for the electronic form: 28,000 viewings of full-text articles, compared with 1,800 uses of the corresponding print volumes. They conclude that “the overwhelming magnitude of the electronic usage must primarily represent the satisfaction of needs that were previously unmet in the print domain”. Tenopir’s digest and analysis of earlier surveys and research studies (2003, p.45) document two intuitively fairly obvious facts. Firstly, convenience “remains the single most important factor for information use. Desktop access, speed of access and the ability to download, print and send articles are top advantages of electronic journals” for all groups of users surveyed. Secondly, younger users are more enthusiastic adopters and rely on electronic resources more heavily. These trends are evident in statistics from my own library. Downloads of full-text articles from e-journals have increased from 220k in 2002/3, through 485k in 2003/4 (when they surpassed for the first time loans of monographs), to 610k in 2004/5. At the same time loans of monographs are decreasing, and reshelving surveys are showing very low usage of hard-copy journals. One interesting factor is that Bournemouth has traditionally been a teaching rather than a research university. This high and increasing use of the electronic journal literature is overwhelmingly by undergraduate and taught postgraduate students, rather than by researchers. A further interesting point is that usage is extremely high in our Institute of Health and Community Studies. Here the majority of students are working nurses, who tend to be older and more technology-averse than their counterparts entering university straight from school. Convenience is obviously a major contributory factor here: the availability of e-resources 24x7, on campus, in hospital libraries, or at home. Recent statistics show that 72% of these students access electronic resources from home. Ball Procuring E-Books for the Virtual Learning Environment We are therefore seeing an explosion in the use by undergraduates of journal articles, traditionally more the preserve of the researcher, because of the factors documented by Tenopir: convenience of availability and the preference of a younger generation for the electronic form. E-books Although revolutionary in terms of delivery and take-up, the advent of e-journals has not changed the mode of use. Indexes and abstracts are searched; articles are selected; prints of them are procured. This is fundamentally no different from the hard-copy process of getting photocopies of articles, either from one's own library or on inter-library loan, after a literature search. The process has been telescoped by the technology, and the user is more in control; but the end-product is the same and this is essentially the way that scholars have worked for many years. However, e-books are different, partly because of the extent of their individual content. Library users are either tied to a screen to read large volumes of text, or obliged to print it themselves. This is not the way that users, or librarians, have worked with hard-copy books, and the end-product is quite different. The difference is magnified because the numbers making intensive use of e-books, particularly textbooks, comprising the whole undergraduate population, are much larger than the numbers making intensive use of e-journals. Cultural and technical difficulties (network and hardware availability, printing capacities and costs) are potentially much more critical. E-books have taken a number of forms. Initially they were intended to be read on dedicated hardware devices. However take-up outside North America was very slow, because of cost, lack of available hardware, and poor on-screen readability. The norm now, particularly in higher education, is for a software solution (such as Adobe) run on a PC, laptop or PDA. Given their portability and multiple functionality, the last two devices seem destined to push out the dedicated reader. Approaches to e-books in terms of functionality are dominated by the metaphor of the book and the database. Gibbons, Peters and Bryan (2003, 6-22) define seven types of functionality, including: physical functionality of the device (such as readability, ergonomics), functionality that helps read the content (such as searchability, navigational tools), enhancing functionality (such as inclusion of multimedia, links to data and bulletin boards), functionality that places the content in a context (such as links to other e-content, inter-textual searchability), functionality that helps the reader 'possess' the text (such as making annotations, printing), and functionality that supports library activities (such as preserving the confidentiality of users, being 'scrubbable'). The Virtual Learning Environment The virtual learning environment (VLE) is not a particularly new phenomenon. It has however now gained widespread acceptance, and will prove itself to be a transformational technology, changing fundamentally how students and their universities interact. One can define a VLE as “the components in which learners and tutors participate in ‘online’ interactions of various kinds, including online learning”. The principal functions of the VLE are: