More on Emery-Pratt:

• book distributors since 1873
• over 9 million titles in print/e formats in the Emery-Pratt catalog
• work with ebrary, EBL, and MyiLibrary platforms or individual publishers
• multiple business models available, including patron driven
• public, academic, and hospital library content

Franny Lee’s interview and 50+ more are available on the NSR interviews page.

The press release:

SIPX Announces Broad Range of Higher-Education Customers and Partners for Innovative Digital Copyright Service

Palo Alto, CA  (May 21, 2013) – SIPX, Inc. today announced a broad range of higher-education school customers and publisher partners for the company’s innovative, end-to-end, digital copyright service.

“Today is an exciting milestone for SIPX,” said Bob Weinschenk, SIPX Chief Executive Officer. “In the past nine months, we’ve spun-out from Stanford, completed our financing, ramped our operations and engaged with a world-class group of customers and partners eager to meet end user demand for a modern and efficient digital copyright management system.”

SIPX provides a new cloud-based technology, created to offer a wide variety of content options, manage copyrights and deliver digital documents for the higher-education marketplace.  Developed from Stanford University research, the SIPX service is fully operational and in use today.

SIPX blends seamlessly into a school’s Learning Management System (LMS) and online education environments such as Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs).  The SIPX service helps instructors enrich their educational materials by delivering all types of course materials, including for-pay, open and royalty-free content.  With the SIPX solution, students can view, print and download this content, faster, more easily and legally.  SIPX recognizes and appropriately applies contextual pricing or pre-existing rights to students, while highlighting how schools and libraries purchase and maintain subscriptions for their communities.  The SIPX service analytics also help schools and publishers improve their understanding of what content students are connecting with and how to leverage that content most effectively.

By offering a transparent, efficient, end-to-end system, SIPX benefits all parties in the ecosystem for higher-education reading materials.

Schools and consortia that have signed up with SIPX include California State University Northridge, Golden Gate University, Occidental College, Stanford University, State University of New York (SUNY) Empire State College, University of Illinois (Urbana-Champaign), the Statewide California Electronic Library Consortium (SCELC) and a wide array of SCELC schools.

Rick Burke, Executive Director of SCELC, said “We’ve seen strong interest from large and small SCELC schools in deploying the SIPX service.  SIPX drew a lot of attention at our recent SCELC Vendor Day, not only for its copyright management technologies, but also for its potential to put the library’s resources front and center for the user.  We look forward to continuing our partnership with SIPX to bring this innovative approach to more libraries.”

In addition to its school customers, SIPX announced partnerships with more than twenty-five (25) publishing, platform and service partners, many of which have joined the SIPX Publisher Advisory Board.  Advisory Board members include Wolters Kluwer Health’s Lippincott Williams & Wilkins Journals, Nature Publishing Group, Perseus Books Group, Brill, Association for Computing Machinery, Business Expert Press, University of California Press, University of North Carolina Press, Pennsylvania State University Press, Brookings Institution, SPIE, and Stanford University Press.  Additional publisher partners being announced today are Rowman and Littlefield, Rosetta Books, IGI-Global, Hindawi, Casemate/Oxbow, Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS), National Information Standards Organization (NISO), ABC-Clio/Praeger Publishers, Berghahn Books, and Inderscience.  Platform and service partners include HighWire Press, Metapress, GeoScienceWorld and Copyright Clearance Center (CCC).

“As a trade publisher, the Perseus Books Group is always looking to reach the academic market through innovative, digital services, and SIPX certainly fits the bill.  We’re thrilled to be partnering with SIPX and connecting with a broader audience,” said Bill Smith, Director of Domestic Rights and Digital Partner Development, Perseus Books Group.

SIPX continues to work with Copyright Clearance Center (CCC) to ensure a seamless integration of the two services.  Tracey Armstrong, President and Chief Executive Officer of CCC, said “We are happy to support SIPX as the company brings a broad, integrated, networked solution for copyright management to the world of post-secondary education.”

More statements of support can be found here.  SIPX expects to announce additional customers and partners in the coming months.

About SIPX, Inc.

Developed at Stanford University, SIPX (pronounced “sip-ex”) is a new web-based technology created to offer a wide range of content options, manage copyrights and deliver digital documents for the higher-education marketplace.  SIPX is the first and only company to provide an end-to-end service with these capabilities.  The SIPX mission is to create an open and transparent system where higher-education content consumers and providers can come together to the benefit of all parties, including libraries, university management, educators, students, creators, publishers, owners, aggregators and rights agents.  SIPX launched its pilot implementation at Stanford in April 2011 and has grown in use ever since.

For more information, visit www.sipx.com or follow SIPX on Twitter (@SIPXCopyright).

Cleveland, May 16, 2013 – Today, more than 7,500 libraries around the world are participating in the Big Library Read, a two-week pilot program launched yesterday that enables millions of library patrons to simultaneously access and read a single eBook title until June 1, 2013. The selected title, The Four Corners of the Sky, by Michael Malone, is available in OverDrive Read, Kindle (U.S. only) and EPUB formats and can be read on virtually any device.

With support from OverDrive and Sourcebooks, Inc., a leading U.S. independent publisher, the Big Library Read will demonstrate the impact of library eBook lending on literacy and reading, as well as on book sales and author recognition. Participating libraries are featuring The Four Corners of the Sky on their home pages for no cost during the pilot period. Library patrons will need a valid library card to check out the title.

“We are thrilled to participate in OverDrive’s Big Library Read project,” said Sari Feldman, Cuyahoga County (Ohio) Public Library Executive Director. “It is an exciting opportunity to engage readers all over the world in a global book discussion and highlight the critical role libraries play in the discovery process. It has long been accepted as conventional wisdom that libraries help drive the success of authors. Through projects like this, we can affirm that wisdom with hard data and reinforce what we already know – that libraries play a key role in marketing books and authors.”

“Public libraries have helped connect millions of readers with books and authors, and the Big Library Read pilot program is a great opportunity for participating libraries to reach new patrons and spread the joy of reading and literacy,” said David Burleigh, OverDrive Director of Marketing.

In addition to ongoing Facebook and Twitter (#BigLibraryRead) conversations during the pilot, Sourcebooks will host a live Facebook chat on May 23 with author Michael Malone. An Emmy Award-winning writer, Malone has received much acclaim for The Four Corners of Sky from The New Yorker, The Washington Post, People magazine and other notable publications.

Many of the largest library systems around the world are participating in the Big Library Read, including: Queens Library (NY), the U.S. Navy, Melbourne Library Service (Australia), Toronto Public Library (Canada), London Libraries Consortium (United Kingdom), and the Nelson Mandela Bay Municipality (South Africa). The Big Library Read is the first event of its kind and may be replicated in the future to reach wider and more targeted audiences.

To find a participating library, visit search.overdrive.com.

About OverDrive
OverDrive is a leading multichannel digital distributor of eBooks, digital audiobooks, music and video. We supply a secure lending platform for 22,000 libraries, schools and retailers worldwide with support for all major computers and devices, including iPhone®, iPad®, Nook®, Android™ phones and tablets, and Kindle® (U.S. only). OverDrive has been named to the EContent 100 as a company that matters most in the digital content industry and is a member of the 2012 Technology Fast 500. Founded in 1986, OverDrive is based in Cleveland. www.overdrive.com

Contact:
David Burleigh
OverDrive, Inc.
216-573-6886 x218
dburleigh@OverDrive.com

Library vendors bringing e-content to libraries have in recent years taken different routes to draw attention to their long-term business strategies. Some have aggressively pursued new publishing initiatives — releasing more original content and adding it to their e-offerings; others have focused on perfecting the functionalities of the digital products already available to libraries. Gale’s mission has been distinct its own right and deserves a closer look, namely owing to the series of announcements in the last year pointing to the company’s newly formed alliances with some of the world’s most reputable organizations, including  The National Geographic, the Smithsonian, and, as of April 2013, the Associated Press.

Just what is the ultimate long-term goal behind these partnerships for a library vendor already known for a robust list of library-oriented products and services? Is Gale’s main mission moving forward to cement its role as the preeminent distributor of the world’s journalistic and historical content? Can we expect more partnerships in the future? NSR reached out to Jim Draper, VP and General Manager for Gale (part of Cengage Learning), to shed light on what these partnerships mean for the future of Gale, its partners, and the wider research community.

Note: This interview does not include any discussion of the recent “restructuring news,” as Gale is currently not providing information beyond what’s already been released to the public last week. Per CEO Michael Hansen’s prepared remarks, we can “expect to see a real shift to a user-and sales-led culture [at Gale] that is focused on delivering innovative customer solutions. We have placed an emphasis on coordinated speed across the organization to accelerate innovation.”–MR

Growing momentum

Gale’s recent partnerships have brought, and promise to bring, to libraries and researchers a line of new products in the coming months and years, including the already-released The National Geographic Virtual Library (NGVL), which includes the complete archive of the National Geographic magazine going back to 1888, plus a host of other National Geographic books, videos, images, and maps.  NGVL now consists of these four components:

•National Geographic Magazine Archive, 1888-1994

•National Geographic Magazine Archive, 1995-Current

•National Geographic: People, Animals, and the World

•National Geographic Kids

The partnership with the Smithsonian, announced this past February, will result in a suite of searchable databases, including the complete archive of the Smithsonian and Air & Space magazines (expected to launch in a few days) and an assortment of other Smithsonian topical collections, including archives on American history, science, and world cultures. More information will eventually be available on the Gale Digital collections web site.

Still in the “discovery and planning” phase, the partnership with the Associated Press will involve a large-scale, multi-year initiative to digitize millions of pages of AP’s news copy, going back to 1846. According to Gale’s April 2013 announcement, the AP collection will also feature never-before-published content, including notes and observations of AP journalists, “potentially giving widely reported events a new perspective.”

These are, no doubt, major undertakings for all involved parties. Although Gale is no stranger to partnering with prestigious institutions, these recent announcements point to a growing momentum. Jim Draper fills in some blanks below.

NSR: This is a ”dream” list of alliances for any library vendor wanting to help these institutions digitize their treasures.

Jim Draper: Gale has been partnering with leading institutions for decades–in fact our longest relationship has been with the British Library (for approximately the past 30 years, beginning as a microfilm supplier), and we have other longstanding relationships with The National Archives (UK), The U.S. National Archives, The Library of Congress, and others. Altogether, we have about 400 institutions currently supplying content to our Gale Digital Collections products. Aligning ourselves with leading cultural institutions ensures we’re able to deliver the most sought-after content for our customers. Our strategy is to transform the library and research business by unlocking access to rare artifacts and providing a source of content never before available, while also clearly distinguishing ourselves from our competitors.

NSR: Why is Gale the ideal digitization and distribution partner for these institutions?

Jim Draper: There are many reasons why Gale is seen as an ideal partner.  We’ve been doing digital publishing for more than 25 years, longer than almost any other publishing company, and we’ve become adept at curating, organizing, digitizing, and highlighting rare and sensitive historical material within our products. Further, we bring metadata capabilities and know-how to the table. This adds tremendous value since metadata enables search and discovery.

Lately—by which I mean during the past two or three years—Gale has distinguished itself for its software. We are investing heavily in tools and services to support researchers. We have met with enormous success in this arena, and I believe that partner-institutions are highly supportive of these efforts since they desire to see their content operating in powerful software environments.

Being part of Cengage Learning, one of the largest higher education publishers, we have access to academic channels and expertise that none of our competitors has. We are one of the only organizations that can build resources that truly bridge from the library to the classroom. We also have extraordinary “contacts” within the scholarly world, so we can draw on experts to help us shape products and to define their content strategy.

Librarians can find more information on our partnerships via a series of videos that give a “Behind the Screens” look at how Gale is digitizing history: http://gdc.gale.com/videos/.

NSR: What will the Smithsonian and AP collections look like when completed? Should we take clues from The National Geographic Virtual Library (already available) and expect similar features?

Jim Draper: Yes, products resulting from the Smithsonian and Associated Press partnerships will be built on the same state-of-the-art platform that we’ve implemented for Nineteenth Century Collections Online and National Geographic Virtual Library.  Some of the highlights of this platform include:

• Textual analysis tools (graphing and term clusters tools) that help researchers identify and visualize patterns, trends and relationships among content.
• Comprehensive subject indexing that makes the content accessible and exposes key elements within the data and reveals important topics, people, places, and dates, identifying relationships among documents.
• Advanced image viewer that enables users to zoom, highlight, rotate, reverse (negative image), and view individual pages in full screen mode, with the ability to adjust brightness and contrast making it easier to read weathered and varied types of documents.

Timelines & Challenges

NSR: Given these organizations’ distinct cultures and missions, each of these partnerships must bring unique challenges for Gale. Have some projects been more testing than others?

Jim Draper: Our publishing decisions are largely dictated by the types of content different institutions possess. We work with our partners very closely to help them achieve their long-term missions. For example, the Smithsonian’s four grand challenges include: Unlocking the Mysteries of the Universe, Understanding and Sustaining a Biodiverse Planet, Valuing World Cultures, and Understanding the American Experience. As a result, we will focus our efforts in these areas as well.

Since its founding, the National Geographic Society has been dedicated to inspiring people to care about the planet, and has focused on geography, archaeology, and natural science, and the promotion of environmental and historical conservation. These are all considerations we take into account as we build products.

One challenge, however, is ever-present as we build out large digital collections, and it creates an “unknown” that requires constant management. I am referring to the conservation of historic documents.  Sometimes, a collection is in excellent physical shape and therefore requires careful but not “special” handling by Gale. At other times, the collection needs extensive, professionally managed conservation before we can even begin to capture images of the documents. In such cases, the timeline MUST adjust to suit the needs of the conservators, since Gale is committed to leaving the materials in equal—or better—condition than when we first encountered them.

NRS: Gale has stated it will take a number of months — and in some cases years — to bring the complete collections from these institutions to libraries. Can you give us more insight into what we can expect in the near future?

Jim Draper: After announcing our partnership with the Smithsonian in February, we are excited to be bringing the first product – the Air & Space and Smithsonian Magazine Archive – to market in just a few a short days. We are also exploring other archives on the topics of American history, science, and world cultures.

As the Associated Press agreement was just announced, we are still very much in the discovery and planning phase. We’ve also begun conducting market research to better understand what information our customers are most anticipating, including specific bureau information, and we expect to launch at least two products in the next 12-16 months.

At Gale, we take a well thought-out approach to developing these resources that involves advisory boards, curators, and a host of other experts. This is a process that takes time, but on the other hand,  the way our development team is structured enables us to bring better products to market more quickly. We employ the agile software development methodology (typically used by small startups), which means a constant loop of user-testing and feedback helps our development team create advanced tools and features that fit into the workflows of our customers. Our staff is structured in more or less self-contained teams, all working side-by-side, with a common vision and a shared understanding. Gone are cubicles, gone is the “waterfall” development approach, gone is a series of hand-offs that eventually lead to a product. The result is a faster development cycle that centers on the specific and evolving needs and goals of our user personae.

Incentives for libraries

NSR: Since libraries continue to operate and acquire resources on tight budgets, can they expect discounts for institutions interested in obtaining content from multiple partners or will these strictly be sold on a product-by-product basis?

Jim Draper: It’s important to note that the products resulting from these partnerships are, at this point, sold on a product-by-product basis, not as a bundle.

We offer a variety of purchase or subscription models based on the type of library and size of user population. We realize that funding can be unpredictable and depending on the specific situation ownership or subscription may be more attractive.

For customers interested in National Geographic Virtual Library, we offer discounts for the subscription of two resources and deeper discounts for the purchase of three or all four.

We do not have specific information on discounts for both Smithsonian and Associated Press as the product lines are still in development.

Long-term vision & strategy

NSR: It seems that Gale is positioning itself as a leading distributor of journalistic and historical content from the world’s top institutions. Does this indicate that the company has less interest at this point in revitalizing its publishing initiatives?

Jim Draper: Through our Gale Digital Collections imprint we’re broadening the types of content we publish—for example, we are very active in the areas of manuscripts, photography, and ephemera—and not limiting ourselves to books, journals, and newspapers.  We’re also beginning to explore the role of three-dimensional objects in the research experience, as well as the role of sound (music, voice and similar).

While Gale Digital Collections is an important part of the Gale portfolio, we also manage an extensive reference and research program for K-12 schools, universities, and public libraries. We continue to publish leading databases on topics like biography, science, and literature, and we maintain the largest online reference library: Gale Virtual Reference Library (GVRL).

In addition, we’re continuing to publish new reference titles under our venerable imprints – Charles Scribner’s Sons, Macmillan Reference USA, and St. James Press – on topics such as the intersection of literature and war, a new title from our “Literature of Society” series.

We listen closely to the needs of our customers and our end users, and we’ll continue to find ways to bring the unique content and rare artifacts they need and want into the research space.  Our goal is to provide for our customers the largest academic humanities research experience.

______________________________________________________

Mirela Roncevic is an independent content developer and consultant. She contributes articles and stories to NSR on digital publishing, ebooks, and content development. Publishers and library vendors may send all PR materials directly to Mirela at mirela@mirelaroncevic.com. She may be followed on Twitter at @MirelaRoncevic.

May 15, 2013, Boston, Oxford – Credo, the industry leader for information skills solutions, today announced that it has launched 12 new and updated Subject and Publisher Collections, adding to the more than 75 collections currently available for perpetual purchase or subscription.  Libraries now have even more options for enhancing their Literati solution or Credo Online Reference Service with essential titles including:

• CQ Press Collection: With titles such as The Presidency A to Z, Encyclopedia of Politics and Religion and The Contemporary Middle East: A Documentary History, the CQ Press Collection offers 16 reference works that cover key topics in US History and Political Science.
• CRC Press Collection: Offering 11 titles, including French’s Index of Differential Diagnosis: An A-Z, Clark’s Pocket Handbook for Radiographers and Illustrated Pharmacology for Nurses, nursing and medical students at the undergraduate level as well as clinical professionals will find that this collection greatly enhances both research and practice.
• Economics Collection: The 18 titles included in Credo’s Economics Collection provide a well-rounded view of macroeconomics, economic decline, social economics, wealth and international economics.
• Philosophy Collection: Credo’s Philosophy Collection presents 35 top-tier reference titles from five of the most notable publishers in the field of Philosophy: Routledge, Brill, Elsevier, Wiley and SAGE.
• Leadership Collection: The Leadership Collection from Credo features 20 key titles from Business Expert Press and SAGE Reference on topics foundational to success in business and management.

Credo has also released updates to seven existing Subject and Publisher Collections, including the popular Focus Medica Health Animation Collection and the Omnigraphics Health Reference Series. By embedding these high-quality reference collections in the award-winning Literati solution, libraries are able to build deep, specific e-book collections and combine authoritative content with innovative, customizable technology that links users of reference through to all of their library’s resources.

“While Literati is significantly more than a reference database, the scholarly reference content that comprises Literati’s foundation is integral to its value as an information skills solution,” said Carol Helton, Credo’s Executive Vice President of Customer Solutions and Marketing.  “Credo gives librarians the tools that they need to extend the learning moment so users can develop critical information literacy skills while addressing their immediate information and research needs.”

About Credo 

A 2013 SIIA CODiE Award winner, Credo believes that everyone deserves the ability to learn and the opportunity to succeed.

To help people achieve their academic, professional and personal goals, Credo partners with libraries, educators, publishers and technology providers to deliver solutions for developing information skills.  Founded in 1999, Credo has offices in Boston and the UK.  For additional information about Credo and its Literati solutions please visit http://corp.credoreference.com.

Cengage Learning investor site: this site includes annual and quarterly reports

Industry articles and blog posts:

Inside Higher Ed:  Cengage publisher could file bankruptcy

Bloomberg News: Cengage CEO seeking restructuring

INFODocket: Cengage CEO seeking restructuring  This includes the Bloomberg news article, embeds some documents and provides additional resource links.

ProQuest Completes Acquisition of EBL

Plans move forward to combine EBL and ebrary into a single, best-of-breed e-book platform

May 14, 2013 (ANN ARBOR, Mich.) – ProQuest, an information company central to global research, has completed its acquisition of Ebook Library (EBL), significantly expanding its e-book delivery and aggregation capabilities with libraries worldwide. The acquisition supports ProQuest’s overall goal of enhancing the research experience through seamless discovery of content across multiple formats, including books, journals, dissertations, newspapers, and video.

Kari Paulson, President of EBL, and EBL’s current staff have joined ProQuest with Ms. Paulson in the role of Vice President and General Manager of the combined ebrary and EBL e-book business unit. Reporting to Kevin Sayar, Senior Vice President of Workflow Solutions, she will lead the planning efforts to combine the strongest features of ebrary and EBL into one optimized e-book platform that has the most flexible selection of business models, the most comprehensive range of content, and the most effective tools available to support both researchers and librarians. The company will be actively soliciting customer feedback throughout the integration in order to provide libraries with an even better e-book solution.

ProQuest does not anticipate disruption for EBL or ebrary customers over the estimated 18 month integration timeframe. Customers and partners should continue to work with their current EBL and/or ProQuest representatives.

To learn more visit ProQuest at www.proquest.com.

About Ebook Library (www.eblib.com)

Ebook Library (EBL) is a leading global ebook aggregator, serving academic, corporate and research libraries worldwide. With an impressive catalog of ebook titles from premier international academic publishers, EBL is renowned as a pioneer of flexible, innovative access models such as Patron-driven Acquisition and the esteemed Non-Linear™ Lending model. EBL is a ProQuest business with offices around the world.

About ProQuest (www.proquest.com)

ProQuest connects people with vetted, reliable information. Key to serious research, the company has forged a 70-year reputation as a gateway to the world’s knowledge — from dissertations to governmental and cultural archives to news, in all its forms. Its role is essential to libraries and other organizations whose missions depend on the delivery of complete, trustworthy information.

ProQuest’s massive information pool is made accessible in research environments that accelerate productivity, empowering users to discover, create, and share knowledge.

An energetic, fast-growing organization, ProQuest includes the ProQuest^®, Bowker^®, Dialog^®, ebrary^®, Ebook Library (EBL), and Serials Solutions^® businesses and notable research tools such as the RefWorks^®, and Pivot^™ services, as well as the Summon^® web-scale discovery service. The company is headquartered in Ann Arbor, Michigan, with offices around the world.

Media Contact:

Beth Dempsey, for ProQuest

+1 248-349-7810 or beth.dempsey@proquest.com

IPSWICH, Mass. — May 7, 2013 — BioOne Online Journals are now searchable via EBSCO Discovery Service^™ (EDS), from EBSCO Publishing. EBSCO Discovery Service users are able to search more than 100,000 scholarly articles from bioscience research journals in the Base Index of EBSCO Discovery Service. The addition of this valuable resource adds to the rapidly growing STM content available to EDS users.

BioOne aggregates publications in the biological, ecological and environmental sciences.  The collection of high-impact bioscience research journals stems from societies, libraries, academe and the private sector – making it an ideal resource for students and researchers. BioOne’s collaboration of publications includes 176 titles from 132 publishers, featuring  timely content on a wide-array of today’s most pressing topics, including global warming, stem cell research and ecological & biodiversity conservation.

EBSCO Discovery Service customers may use a CustomLink to access full text on the BioOne site. CustomLinks are a feature that dynamically creates links from a result to related information on another web site and is one of many linking options for EDS customers to extend the reach of discovery.

BioOne is part of a growing list of publishers and other content partners that are taking part in EDS to bring more visibility to their content. Partners include the world’s largest scholarly journal & book publishers including Elsevier, Wiley Blackwell, Springer Science & Business Media, Taylor & Francis Informa, Sage Publications, Nature Publishing, IEEE, ACM and thousands of others. Partners also include content providers, such as LexisNexis, Thomson Reuters (Web of Science), JSTOR, ARTstor, Credo Reference, Encyclopedia Britannica, World Book, ABC-CLIO, The Hathi Trust and many others.

EBSCO Discovery Service creates a unified, customized index of an institution’s information resources, and an easy, yet powerful means of accessing all of that content from a single search box—searching made even more powerful because of the quality of metadata and depth and breadth of coverage.

EBSCO Discovery Service is quickly becoming the discovery selection for many libraries (www.ebscohost.com/discovery/eds-news), and an obvious partner for content providers. Because the service builds on the foundation provided by the EBSCOhost^® platform, libraries gain a full user experience for discovering their collections/OPAC—which is not typical in the discovery space. Further still, in the many universities and other libraries where EBSCOhost is the most-used platform for premium research, users are not asked to change their pathways or habits for searching. There’s simply more to discover on the familiar EBSCOhost platform, and the same can be said for library administrators who can leverage their previous work with EBSCOadmin^™.

About EBSCO

EBSCO is the leading provider of resources for libraries including EBSCONET®, EBSCO’s total e-resource management system, and EBSCOhost^®, the world’s premier for-fee online research service, including full-text databases, subject indexes, point-of-care medical reference, historical digital archives and e-books.  EBSCO provides more than 375 research databases and more than 380,000 e-books plus subscription management services for 355,000 e-journals and e-journal packages. Through a library of tens of thousands of full-text journals and magazines from renowned publishers, EBSCO serves the content needs of all researchers (Academic, Medical, K-12, Public Library, Corporate, Government, etc.). EBSCO is also the provider of EBSCO Discovery Service^™ (EDS), which provides each institution with a fast, single search box for its entire collection, offering deeper indexing and more full-text searching of journals and magazines than any other discovery service. For more information, visit the EBSCO Web site at: www.ebsco.com. EBSCO is a division of EBSCO Industries Inc., one of the largest privately held companies in the United States.

On Saturday, May 4, at 2:58 a.m. (MDT), the holding symbol for the University of Alberta Libraries, in Edmonton, was set through an automated process to the WorldCat record for the e-book, Evaluation of the City of Lakes Family Health Team Patient Portal Pilot Project: Final Report, published in 2012 by the Centre for Rural and Northern Health Research. It was the 2 billionth holding set in WorldCat. The e-book catalog record was created by the Canadian Electronic Book Library, an e-book provider in Canada, and was enhanced through OCLC’s automated authority control processing system.

WorldCat is a database of bibliographic information created and continuously updated by some 25,000 OCLC member libraries around the world. WorldCat records describe specific works and contain a listing of institutions that own an item, referred to as “holdings.” Institutions use holdings information to create local catalogs, arrange interlibrary loans and conduct reference work.

“It is astounding that the number of holdings in WorldCat has doubled in less than eight years,” said Jay Jordan, OCLC President and CEO. “This is strong testimony to the power of global library collaboration. I want to thank the University of Alberta, and the thousands of librarians and catalogers around the world who are working daily to create this unique and valuable resource for knowledge seekers everywhere.”

WorldCat was created in 1971 so that libraries could share cataloging information from a central database, increasing workflow efficiency and the ability to locate and loan materials. It took the OCLC cooperative almost 34 years, from August 26, 1971 to August 11, 2005, to add 1 billion holdings in WorldCat. It has taken just seven years and eight months to add the next billion.

WorldCat spans six millennia of recorded knowledge, from about 4800 B.C. to the present. It encompasses records for books, serials, sound recordings, musical scores, maps, visual materials, mixed materials and computer files.

In recent years, OCLC has made a series of technological advances that has made it possible to process millions of records and holdings through batchloads. OCLC has also made a concerted effort to partner with national libraries, library agencies, regional metadata hubs and other groups. This has resulted in the loading of national bibliographies and other important collections.

Academic and cultural researchers value WorldCat as much for its depth and distinctiveness as its size. Libraries often hold unique and significant materials, including maps, music, artifacts, theses and other research materials that can be found nowhere else. In a world where general reference, entertainment and news content becomes widely available online, WorldCat helps libraries describe and promote local and specific knowledge far beyond the boundaries of any single institution.

For example, many genealogists value WorldCat as a central source for unique family and local history records. Because WorldCat represents items from more than 170 countries and 470 languages, scholars use the database to locate and borrow items around the world. More than 40 national libraries contribute to WorldCat, including recent additions from Japan, Spain, Israel and China, and over 60 percent of the records in WorldCat are for materials in non-English languages.

OCLC member institutions use a variety of specific services to add, enhance and access WorldCat records, improving workflows and helping libraries save time and money. Anyone can search these collections at www.WorldCat.org. WorldCat.org users can find nearby libraries that hold an item, build personalized lists, easily create citations and post reviews and ratings.

Other public views of WorldCat include WorldCat Identities, which provides summary pages for the name of every person, organization and fictional character in WorldCat (currently around 30 million); WorldCat Genres, which allows users to browse hundreds of genres from WorldCat; and WorldCat Kindred Works, a content-based service that helps users find similar materials of interest. In addition, the WorldCat Live! API provides a real-time stream of newly added records of library collections and published materials to WorldCat.

WorldCat information is also syndicated through relationships with partners such as Google, Goodreads and EasyBib. When searching these and other popular online services, information seekers can connect to local libraries through WorldCat links and data services.

Find more about WorldCat on the OCLC website, and watch WorldCat grow as libraries around the world contribute to the database.

At this point, it’s anyone’s guess what the vast and growing ebooks landscape in libraries will look like a year or two from now, but as it stands right now, librarians need to keep up or they will remain behind. That’s what this report aims to do: provide a starting point from which they can embark on their institutions’ ebook ventures.

The goal here is to break it all down for them–objectively and in as much detail as a single author can handle without losing track of it all herself–and to provide a Zagat-style A-Z listing of all the key players in the ebooks market, explain their identities, and the uniqueness of their products. To help me sort through the mess, I’ve developed a technique I use each time I evaluate a new vendor: if you are not producing content from scratch like a publisher or merging content from multiple books for research purposes like an aggregator, then you are a type of distributor. And, of course, you can be more than one of these three at the same time.

It took several months to compile this report. Although I am its sole author, I relied on the feedback provided by a number of (willing) vendors who were asked to supply information as current as possible about each product. The survey sent to the companies catering to libraries (including publishers, aggregators, distributors, and ebook lending services) included a long list of questions, grouped according to these four purchasing criteria: content, technical specs, functionality, and business model. Here is a sampling of the types of information requested from all four groups:

• number of titles
• subjects covered
• type of service (e.g., aggregator, lending service, etc)
• number of publishers represented
• key library markets (e.g., public, academic/research, K-12)
• inclusion of multi-media
• ebook formats (e.g., ePub, PDF)
• reading devices supported
• ADA compliance (yes or no)
• DRM limitations (copy, paste, print, etc.)
• Offline reading (yes or no)
• Annotation tools
• Usage reports
• Interlibrary Loan options
• Annual platform fees
• Minimal commitment
• Consortial purchasing
• Free trials