The book could be used entirely in an online format or the scholar could choose to acquire a print version of all or part of the book once he had browsed the online version. Alternatively, at least at some point in time and for some forms of books, such as textbooks, an electronic format such as a CD-ROM might be better - for technical, cost or market reasons - than either the online or the print format. Malcolm Getz addressed some of the format issues well in his paper at this conference, Electronic Publishing in Academia: An Economic Perspective.
In effect, funds that would have been spent on interlibrary loan activities, i.e., staff and mailing costs, would be redirected to the producers of the scholarly knowledge, thus supporting the production and dissemination of such scholarship.
Detailed background information is provided in the Project's Analytical Principles and Design document of December 1995 and in its Annual Report of February 1997. Both are available at http://www.columbia.edu/dlc/olb/.
Ultimately, if online books were to become a regular product of scholarly publishers, the publishers would make the online version a regular output of their production process. This reengineering might or might not lead to a reduction in publishers' production costs, but it would certainly mean that universities would not be faced with the conversion of printers' tapes to HTML.
Software allowing annotation of an electronic document is available, but few people are aware of it. The Project will seek to bring such software to the Columbia community as feasible.
A few reference books were already online. Their design will be discussed shortly.
The SGML mark-up of these texts as provided was inconsistent. A conversion which was expected to be done quickly and nearly automatically was instead a labor intensive, time consuming process, resulting in the delayed provision of the texts on the Web.
Publishers, including Chadwyck-Healey and Oxford, have provided permission for such conversion.
Greater detail is available in the Annual Report. See Appendix 1 for a summary of the online collection with titles, subject matter and location within the Libraries collections of the print copies (reference, regular circulating collection, reserves collection).
Until recently contracts with authors contained no provision for electronic versions of books. Current contracts include such provisions, but royalties are specified as a percentage of revenues derived from sales in electronic format. As there is no price for the materials included in this research effort, the Press needs to obtain permissions for this special use.
Our agreement with Garland requires them to provide HTML-coded files as we do not have funding to undertake conversion for additional publishers. Thus, Garland must assess its manpower and funding availability in determining the books it will provide.
One Oxford file is awaiting conversion.
Two of these books, designed for course use, have gone into new editions since we received the electronic files, so we need to obtain the files for the latest editions before putting these two books online.
See the Annual Report on the Project's Web home page for greater detail.
So far the Project Coordinator has conducted telephone interviews with three authors who refused permission and inquired about their reasons for doing so. Columbia University Press received explanatory comments from several other authors when they refused permission.
Recommendations from satisfied users to their colleagues is always one of the key sources of sampling for new products. However, it is one over which we have least control.
By early Summer 1997, the online Reserves catalog will contain entries for the online versions of books that have been put on reserve for various courses. This should increase usage by students in courses for which a book is assigned reading.
A repeat user of the collection could bookmark any of the pages and return to it with just one step.
The OED, Granger's Index to Poetry, Chaucer Name Dictionary, African American Women, and Native American Women.
Consistent with marketing theory, the TULIP project found that usage of online journals was much greater at institutions that had conducted substantial campaigns to build awareness and trial. See Elsevier Science, TULIP Final Report, 1996, for details.
As noted earlier, this document is included on the Web page for the Project. Questionnaires and other research methodologies have been fine-tuned after pretests and early use, but the general concepts remain in place.
Networked printing that allows such tracking is not yet in place.
The chart does not have value labels, so these are estimates of the values.
Source: Amy Cortese, "A Census in Cyberspace," Business Week Online News Flash, April 24, 1997
Data are taken from a fact sheet issued by Columbia's Academic Information Systems in February 1997.
A question about access to a Web browser has just been added to Project questionnaires.
In a Spring 1997 interview, a second year social work graduate student who lives in New Jersey said that she has a modem in her home computer but does not use it as direct dialup to Columbia is a long distance call and at $20 a month an ISP account is too expensive. She thought that about half her classmates might not use the Internet from home even if they had computers.
For the following tables, Web data prior to May 1966 include hits by Project staff, those from May 1966 forward do not. These were excluded as they can be substantial in number as resources are in design phases and do not reflect the scholarly use that we are studying. The earlier statistics cannot be refined to extract such hits. NA: data are not available; NC: total or change is not calculable.
Analyzing server data is proving more difficult than anticipated as user identification is instituted. In the future, data will be reported on a monthly basis and reports will be issued quarterly.
This is the common opinion of users who have completed questionnaires and others who were interviewed by email and in person.
While AcIS has designed a Web version of The OED which has various analytical capabilities, unfortunately that version requires more server resources than AcIS can devote to this single work.
These are host computers with addresses linking them to the dormitory network. See section 4.3.1.2.
Their questionnaires have not been removed since we started tracking these books in January 1997.
A larger collection is available on CD-ROM in the Electronic Text Service. We could not obtain permission to put some of these online.
This type of skewed distribution, or Bradford law, is typical of all types of library collections.
Gitterman's Mutual Aid Groups was on reserve for three professors for Fall 1996 semester, but we could not put it in the collection accessible to the Columbia community until November due to delays in obtaining permission from the authors. It was in use in three Social Work classes for Spring 1997 semester.
Community members can request that a book be recalled but that process is not guaranteed to bring the book back to the library and it can take several weeks. Online books are always accessible for such browsing.
This impression was confirmed in a recent interview with a second year social work student. She noted that her home computer has a modem but that she does not have a ISP account or dial-in to Columbia from her home in New Jersey (a long distance call) because of the cost. All of her use of online resources occurs on campus, in the Social Work computer lab or in a library.
Hitherto, IP addresses were the basis of controlling access to the books. The new authorization system was put into effect for The OED at the first of April 1997. One means of accessing The OED, via a bookmark, is necessarily not included, so The OED's use is still understated. It is not yet in place for Granger's Index to Poetry so that resource is not included in this analysis.
We are in the process of obtaining permission from institutions affiliated with Columbia to use the directory information about their users for our research. As a result, we do not have cohort detail on 40 (14%) of the users. Percentages given are with that set of 'unidentified users' as a separate group.
We have removed Officers of the Libraries and specific other individuals who are involved in the Project from these data.
For use data to show revealed preference, the collection must contain books that would draw users to the collection repeatedly - either books that users want to look at repeatedly or an assortment of books that pulls scholars to the collection for a variety of purposes.
The Past Masters texts used in the second semester of the course are studied at the beginning of the semester making it difficult to make arrangements with the instructors on time.
JAKE is the networked laser printer system maintained by AcIS. Undergraduates and Social Work students have a free 100 page quota for JAKE printing each week.
The two Garland reference books are not separated out, even though different uses are offered on their questionnaires.
Two changes were instituted in the middle of the Spring semester - a snappier line requesting completion of the survey and a change to a $20 gift certificate from a $20 copycard.
All textual documents available on CWeb can be accessed via any graphical interface or via lynx. Lynx can be used at the University's Unix prompt with the command lynx http://www.columbia.edu/....../