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The Challenging Landscape of Ebooks in Libraries
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by Paula J. Hane
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The overall growth in digital content of all kinds, and in particular, the growing importance and acceptance of ebooks, has clearly presented great opportunities for libraries, as well as plenty of challenges. Many libraries are coping with decreasing budgets while at the same time experiencing increased demand for content and services. Challenges include limited availability of ebooks from publishers, increasing demands for tech support with ebook readers and mobile devices, cumbersome borrowing processes, and minimal discoverability of ebook content. Two recent reports shed some light on the current situation, providing interesting statistics and perspectives.
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Desire2Learn Announces New Integration Partnerships
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Desire2Learn, Inc., a provider of teaching and learning platforms, and Cengage Learning, a provider of teaching, learning, and research solutions, announced the availability of enhanced interoperability of Cengage Learning's digital content and solutions within the Desire2Learn platform. Desire2Learn and CourseSmart, a provider of etextbooks and digital course materials, also announced an enhanced integration that will enable students and faculty to access CourseSmart's growing catalog of more than 30,000 titles more seamlessly within their existing workflows.
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iCopyright Granted U.S. Patent on Peer-Policing System
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iCopyright.com announced that it has been granted a U.S. patent on its instant copyright licensing and verification system. The invention is unique because it enables people to instantly verify that someone using copyrighted material has the proper license to do so, and it enables others to obtain their own license to use the work directly from the copied work, not just the original.
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NPG Expands Linked Data Platform
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As part of its wider commitment to open science, Nature Publishing Group's (NPG) Linked Data Platform now hosts more than 270 million Resource Description Framework (RDF) statements. It has been expanded more than 10 times in a growing number of datasets. These datasets have been created under the Creative Commons Zero (CC0) waiver, which permits maximal use/reuse of this data. The data is now being updated in real time, and new triples are being dynamically added to the datasets as articles are published on nature.com.
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The Institution of Engineering and Technology to Launch New Digital Library
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by Paula J. Hane
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With the goal of making more content more accessible to a wider market, the Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET) announced a significantly redeveloped and enhanced Digital Library. Scheduled to launch later this summer, the Digital Library is part of the IET's mission to facilitate access to essential engineering intelligence worldwide. All of the IET's research content will be available on the new platform. It has been developed on Publishing Technology's pub2web platform, which is designed to improve the speed and ease with which academic and corporate users can access the IET's 3,000 ebook chapters and 185,000 journal articles that date from 1872.
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