| The JISC national e-books observatory project has funded MyiLibrary to make available online some of the most popular textbooks in Business & Management Studies, Engineering and Media Studies, selected by academic librarians in a collaboration with Pearson Education, Taylor & Francis, Elsevier Science, Palgrave Macmillan, Cambridge University Press and Thomas Telford. Through the project a total of 26 textbooks are being made available on the MyiLibrary platform, free to all UK students.
MyiLibrary is also working with JISC on a national research project that will study what happens when these eBooks are freely available to students. How will they find them? How will they use them? What impact will eBooks have on their learning? The JISC funded study will gather much needed evidence for publishers about the impact of eBook availability on traditional print sales, and help publishers develop exciting news ways of presenting traditional texts. Libraries and publishers will learn about future pricing models, and how to promote the online use of eBooks.
The many advantages of the MyiLibrary platform include the benefits of cross-searching multiple resources, ease of discovery and access via Athens and other routes. This is the second major UK national initiative centred on the MyiLibrary aggregated platform. Coutts, who acts as the primary channel for collection development to the library sector, has recently renewed its national contract with the National Health Service (NHS) to provide the core content to health professionals in the NHS on the MyiLibrary platform. The JISC project opens up similar countrywide access to academics, researchers and students in UK Higher Education.
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