Friday 23 January 2009

Call for focus group participants for eBook project

Are you an engineering student or member of staff? Would you be interested in participating in a focus group to help formulate ebook publishing? If so, please read on...

The JISC e-Book Observatory Project (http://www.jiscebooksproject.org) is about exploring impacts, observing behaviours and developing new models to stimulate the e-books market, and to do all this in a managed environment.

The aims are to licence a collection of e-books that are highly relevant to UK HE course taught students, to evaluate the use of the e-books and to transfer knowledge acquired in the project to publishers, aggregators and libraries to help stimulate an e-books market.

Through statistical data and questionnaire responses, the University of Nottingham was identified as one of the higher users of e-books and has been asked to participate in the next stage of the project.

A team based at Aberystwyth would like to set up focus group interviews with academic staff and students in engineering who are users of the e-books in the MyiLibrary collection (engineering, business & management, media studies): http://www.jisc-collections.ac.uk/catalogue/myilibrary.aspx . These ebooks are available through our library online catalogue

The interview questions will be circulated beforehand, and the interviews will be recorded but quoted anonymously and so no institution will be identified. It is anticipated that the focus groups would be held sometime in February or the first 2 weeks of March.

If you are interested in participating, could you please contact Jane Maltby (jane.maltby@nottingham.ac.uk)

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