2017 Charleston Library Conference

Scholars Portal has been aggregating locally loaded ebooks for Ontario universities on an eBrary-backed platform since 2009— eons ago in the world of library technology! Over the last year, Scholars Portal Books has received a rewrite from the ground up, and this time the focus is on building a platform that anticipates the future of ebook access and usage. After extensive community consultation, we knew we wanted a front-end that was accessible beyond legal requirements, a back-end where metadata was harmonized using the BITS standard, and an admin module where local eresource staff could generate usage stats, MARCs, and KBART title lists on the fly. Finally, we needed all of it set up to move through a Trustworthy Digital Repository.

No surprise, there have been many challenges along the way, and none of them are unique to consortia: How do we handle corrections to old PDFs? What do we do with six ISBNs? More broadly, how do we support local scholarship at scale, and how can we make space for the open educational resources increasingly being integrated into higher education?

This session will look at the complex ebook landscape through a consortial lense — from licensing and entitlements management, to wrangling a dozen XML schemas and implementing ever-changing DRM restrictions, towards the ultimate goal of preserving Ontario university’s books content for the long term.