The survey ran from 29 November 2012 to 28 February 2013, with a pop up prompt appearing after logging in to the platform, and we received 162 responses.

54% of respondents indicated they were regular users of the platform and used it either several times a week or once a week and 61% said they would recommend JISC Historic Books. Features that were liked include the breadth of the collection and the ability to search online and download for offline reading. We received a range of suggestions for improvements which will be taken on board as we develop the platform.

We were also pleased to receive some very positive comments including:

Higher Education, postgraduate student:

“The breadth of the collection – and ease of finding material – is remarkable.”

Higher Education, undergraduate student:

“It provides a formidable database of early texts which can be used for research in a variety of areas.”

Other sector, researcher/reader:

“I certainly do recommend it – it would be impossible to conduct research today without consulting it.”

The full report is available to download online

JISCeCollections Newsletter Easter 2013

Take a look at it and see how to do it on the JISC MediaHub platform.

The survey appears as a pop-up during user sessions but has a permanent web address for ease of access – https://www.survey.ed.ac.uk/mediahub_2012_13/

We are also pleased to announce that JISC MediaHub now searches the My Leicestershire History Collection:

My Leicestershire History is a free local history resource containing photographs, films, sound recordings, and books about the history of Leicester and Leicestershire. This comprises five collections: East Midlands Oral History Archive, Ghost Signs of Leicestershire, Media Archive for Central England, BBC Radio Leicester, Vanished Leicester.

If you have any queries about these developments or about anything else relating to JISC MediaHub, please contact us at: edina@ed.ac.uk or tel: 0131 650 3302

Regards

EDINA Helpdesk

New sorting options: on the results screen there are now more sort options so as well as being able to sort results by Relevance and Date,  users can now also sort results by Author and Title.

New Item selection: We now have a tick box next to each item. Once items have been selected they can be emailed, exported or saved to My Bibliography (see note below). Emailing prompts for an email address and then sends  the basic bibliographic information including a link to the full text for each selected item. Exporting allows the download of selected items in one of three formats compatible with the major reference management software.

My Bibliography: the new My Bibliography feature is only available to users logging in with a personalised Shibboleth or OpenAthens ID. If users are using IP based authentication then personalisation options are not available. My Bibliography allows you to build up a personal list of books and is saved against your user ID. This means the list is saved between sessions. My Bibliography can be accessed from the options on the top of the screen.

New Plain Text tag: All items have the tag Plain Text. If this is not clickable (greyed out) a “mouse over” message advices users that only an image of the book is available. At present this only effects books in EEBO that have not yet been keyed in.

If you have any questions do get in touch!

JISC eCollections Newsletter – October 2012

The next batch of developments includes

• More options for sorting results
• Ability to see at a glance if a book has searchable text (at present this is only relevant for non-transcribed EEBO books)
• Marking items in a list and then emailing results, exporting results to reference management tools or saving the results to a saved list
• A “My Bibliography” where you can saved marked items

To use the My Bibliography your users need to login using a unique ID (Shibboleth or Athens) – it will not work if you are using IP Access (and the option to save list will not be shown)

My Bibliography will be saved between sessions, just like saved searches and preferences are at the moment.

Keep an eye out for these enchancements and let us know if there are any issues.

Book Viewer Enhancements

All our enhancements in this round focus on the book viewer screen to enable you to read all the Historic Books easier and are listed below.

• Next/previous book in list – this allows you to move to the next or previous book in the list of results without having to close the viewer
• New thumbnail view options. This enables you to see thumbnails of the pages in the selected book and cycle through them quickly to select a page you would like to see in more detail.
• Improved Zoom . You can now zoom up to 400% in variable zoom. This can also be used in conjunction with the new full screen function.
• Full Screen mode. . The full screen view removes all the additional information on screen about the book and search results etc.
• Improved PDF download. Higher quality PDFs, with smaller file size. The PDFs are now not just image files but are searchable.

On the results screen you also have the option to jump straight to thumbnails in the viewer if you wish.

If you have any questions or comments about these improvements please let Scott know.

Here is an excerpt……

What Principles Guided the Development?

The development of the three platforms was guided by a range of studies on the behaviour, information-seeking strategies and digital and information literacy of students and academics (Figure 3). They were undertaken in the UK and US (an overview of these studies is provided in the Digital Information Seeker Report [1]). Many of these studies were funded by JISC, with a focus on providing institutions with practical recommendations on how to improve library services to support the needs of users, and how to keep such services simple for end-users (‘the “simple” philosophy’). One of the studies, the JISC national e-books observatory project [2] was managed by JISC Collections and provided a great deal of insight into the frustrations and issues faced by users in accessing and using e-book platforms.

The most influential study, however, in terms of the development of the JISC eCollections platforms, was the User Behaviour in Resource Discovery (UBiRD) study undertaken by Wong et al. at the Middlesex University Interaction Design Centre [3]. The findings and recommendations of this study supported the user behaviour observed and the feedback gathered during the e-books observatory project, and also the frustrations expressed by librarian members of JISC Collections at various advisory board meetings. For JISC, as the funder of the studies, and JISC Collections, as a shared service for its members, it was important to take on board the recommendations of the studies in order to base design and development decisions on the evidence gathered.

Read the full article – Launching a New Community-owned Content Service.

I recently attended the series of JISC Collections Roadshows running in June and July across the UK, updating the audience on the progress of JISC eCollections over the past year.

One of the features of the JISC eCollections service is that there is an Advisory Board for each platform. Each Advisory Board includes academic and library staff. These experts, representing their community, decide the development priorities of each platform and in the presentation I gave, you can see some of whats planned for the platforms over the comming months.

The JISC Historic Books platform has had the most changes since the last roadshow and the slides show how the platform has evolved over those 12 months, based on user feedback. The slides then finish showing the platform developments planned for JISC Historic Books which should become available in late summer 2012.

The presentation finished with the offer of a 50% discount on subscriptions for the next year (August 2012 – July 2012).

Some of the questions i received were as follows:
Q: Is JISC eCollections available via Research Discover Services such as Summon, Primo and Ebsco?
A: We are working with these providers, and have for example, provided them all with Kbart lists of the journals we hold. We hope to integrate our resources better over the coming year.

Q: MARC records – are they available for the JISC Historic Books (JHB)?
A: Not yet, but we are working with the British Library and English Short Title Catalogue to make these records available.  The JHB service is open URL compliant with a unique link to each book.

Q: Are there any usage statistics available?
Yes. Edina already supply the JISC MediaHub statistics. Statistics from MIMAS for JISC Journal Archives and JISC Historic Books will be available in September.

View the presentation.