Wednesday, January 23, 2002

Consortium of 12 Universities Begins Project to Deliver Academic E-Books By JEFFREY R. YOUNG Academic libraries and university presses at Big Ten universities and the University of Chicago have teamed up in an e-publishing venture that aims to put hundreds of scholarly books in electronic form. Last month, leaders of the 12 universities committed from $50,000 to $100,000 to develop a prototype for the joint e-publishing venture, says Tom Peters, director of the consortium's center for library initiatives. The institutions have worked together for decades as part of a group called the Committee on Institutional Cooperation. The hope is that university presses in the consortium might one day offer all of their books in electronic form in a version that could be linked to a joint online library catalog that the group already operates. It could quickly become be a sizable collection: The university presses publish about 1,000 new books each year. The electronic books would be offered at no charge to libraries within the consortium, says Mr. Peters. The consortium is also considering making the service available to other academic libraries for a fee that would help pay to run the operation, he adds. Details of the project -- including its name -- have yet to be worked out. Each university has assigned a campus librarian and a staff member from its university press to draft a plan for the project by June. "Libraries and presses have usually been treated as entirely separate entities," says Douglas Armato, director of the University of Minnesota Press, which is part of the consortium. "But it only makes sense that we could find ways to address each other's issues." The project is driven in part by "a lot of dissatisfaction" among university libraries and publishers with commercial e-publishing efforts such as netLibrary, says Mr. Armato. That company, which sells collections of electronic books to libraries, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in November and has since been purchased by the OCLC Online Computer Library Center, a nonprofit library organization. Another commercial service, ebrary, just unveiled the latest version of its e-book service last week. But members of the Big Ten consortium say that their project will not necessarily make such third-party services obsolete. "We're not sure whether we're going to be in direct competition with ebrary and Questia," says Mr. Peters, referring to another commercial e-book collection. "It's too soon to tell." Some university presses in the consortium have long worked to make their content available in electronic form, though they have not worked with other universities to do so in a consistent format, says Paula Kaufman, leader of the consortium's library director's group and the university librarian at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Easy-to-print version E-mail this article

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