JISC RSC YH Exchange News

The e-books for FE project provides 2990 e-book titles free of charge to FE colleges under unlimited simultaneous access.

This means all students have access to a digital library 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. The e-books within the collection include BTEC textbooks, study guides, through to textbooks endorsed by the Scottish Qualifications bodies. E-books have clear benefits for distance learners, part time students or people who simply prefer not to go to the campus to read material.

The project is funded for five years, but the objective is sustainability. This will involve helping FE colleges to grow their own, personalised collections of e-books. From September 2009 additional e-books will be made available through the e-Select Framework Agreement, to enable colleges to procure additional e-books at specially negotiated prices at the same terms and conditions as the Core Collection.

JISC Collections would like you to tell them your priorities for e-books to be included in the Framework Agreement. This could include titles not included in the project,  or books you would like to support new curriculum areas or levels. For titles not currently available as e-books there could be costs in clearing rights and in participating in the agreement, so publishers will need to ensure that there is sufficient demand from the community and, in turn, JISC Collections needs to make sure that the titles are affordable by colleges. Therefore, the more information they can obtain from the community, the more likely publishers are to make informed and reasonable submissions.

JISC Collections would be extremely grateful if you could complete the short (5 minute) survey here:

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=k5yIF_2fOu7F8dg_2fDVfVO9Pw_3d_3d

Further enquiries should be addressed to Anna Vernon, e-books for FE Project Manager, JISC Collections: a.vernon@jisc.ac.uk

www.jiscebooksproject.org