Can You Imagine a Better Academic E-book Experience? Piloting SimplyE in Academic Libraries (+demo)

I think it’s about time to get started so let me welcome you to this breakout of our spring 2020 virtual CNI member meeting we have three speakers today Rob Carol on Oh Michelle Kimpton and James English their affiliations are noted on the the slide here the topic is academic eBook experiences and the use of the simply e-book reader in academic e-book settings and this is one of these topics that has has taken on increasing importance in light of the current current situation as we are being forced to move extremely aggressively towards ebooks and away from physical books so I’m delighted that we can have we can have this material to think about today so I understand that Michelle you’re going to start so I’ll hand it off to you I’ll just say that we will take questions at the end after all three speakers have spoken you there is a QA tool down at the bottom of your screen and you can use that to queue up questions at any point during the presentation and then we’ll just get to them all at the end Dianne golden Burkhardt will be moderating questions at the end of this session so with that thank you all for joining us and over to you Michelle great thanks so much cliff and thanks for hosting this virtual meeting I’m sure is been challenging for your team I hope everybody here has been staying safe and practicing self-care and these really trying and new times for all of us next language James thank you so over a year ago Rob myself and James were at a CNI meeting and we actually presented gave the CNI attendees an introduction to simply a platform an open-source platform for the seamless delivery of e-books and at that time it was beginning to gain momentum in the public library space as a nationally national library led and library driven by lending platform and through conversations with both Rob and James which really which whom were familiar with the project we saw many parallels to ebook delivery between academic libraries and what public libraries were facing and we began to think about with this technology be viable for the academic library community could we conceive of a way that all ebooks that are delivered to patrons and academic libraries could come through a single source an app that was run managed and controlled by the academic library community so we began on this journey to think about not only simply for public libraries but also to start to conceive simply for academic libraries and today we’re going to give you a quick update on where we’ve been in that journey and some of the new developments that will benefit academic markets and plans to pilot it simply in academia I will start out the discussion giving a project overview so what’s what’s happened in the last two years my focus has been on mainly on public libraries I’ll talk about the uptake of simply in the public library space I will then turn it over to James English who will give a demonstration with particular focus on things that academic libraries might care about and new things that have come into fruition over the last two years and then Rob card Alana will follow up with some survey results in the academic market and then recent and future plans next slide next slide James do you hear me right is this the correct slide my Internet’s a little bit so I didn’t hear the last word okay so for those of you that are not familiar with simply e my pl received a grant in 2013 by IMLS to deliver an open-source ear eating platform that any library could adopt and enable them to serve eat content to their patrons through a single app which is aptly named simply II and this was really in response to a need to have a library controlled and library branded be reading experience which ideally would strengthen not weaken the patron relationship and as cliff noted particularly right now this is really important where many of our physical libraries I think almost all physical libraries are closed and therefore we can’t deliver physical content to our patrons in a recent other webinar I was in Calvin Watson the CEO of Broward County Library in Florida said ebooks are becoming the hero resource of our time as they were able to increase their delivery of ebooks through simply e and also shift their physical budgets to digital acquisitions and increase reading materials for their readers in 2013 when this project was started my failed a founding institution they began developing the open-source platform by 2017 it was in production NYPL over the last two years there have been currently now over 200 libraries that have adopted simply e and these are a range of libraries from large urban libraries to library consortium all ur regional libraries and any state libraries there we go that’s the right slide across across the country so there’s been over the last two years quite a lot of momentum and and much broader adoption throughout the throughout the country next slide some of the key reasons for adoption the main one which I’ve discussed is that libraries really want to have a platform that they can control that they are delivering a unified set of ebooks to their patrons so they’re not sending their patrons to multiple vendor based platforms which are very difficult for patrons to understand sometimes and understand what content they’re getting from what platform so the beauty of libraries implant simply is that all of the content you want to deliver to your user is all available through a single app in addition to that vendors don’t always protect your patron privacy there are sometimes third-party agreements that your users need to sign in order to access this content through this project you control what you control your patient privacy and your patron data so you’re not giving that out to third parties and no third party is getting access to it okay next slide a year ago as momentum was increasing in the public library space we formed the simply Advisory Council this is a group that gives input and guidance on the roadmap as well as puts together communication materials outreach materials training materials and documentation to enable the adoption of simply and to provide materials for libraries in a cohesive and consistent fashion and that group has been meeting for a year um there are currently I believe 12 organizations that are part of the founding Advisory Council and they meet monthly to discuss all things simply make decisions as a result on how to move forward together next slide this is a fairly simplified version of the components that make up library simplified in the app so on the left hand side you have ebook repositories so you might be getting content from several different sources in the case of academic libraries you might have the University Press ebooks that are managed by one vendor you might have licensed ebooks that are coming from different a variety of different vendors and you also might have access to public domain ebooks that you have in your own library or you have through another third party through the middleware which is the library simplified circulation manager the data from these ebook repositories come together and are aggregated so that you can make the content available through the simply app for your patron as the library you run that circulation manager which allows you to choose which content you want to display through the app and allows you to organize that content the fashion that you want your patrons to see it so you can organize it by genre by subject by you know what author publisher whatever you think is going to be most relevant for your community next slide some of the key features that have been developed over the last year which are more relevant to the academic market that weren’t available when we talked with you last is the PDF viewer so academic for academic community PDF is an important format in order to be able to have for a reading and so the app launched with epubs as the primary format but EF is now available as well we’ve also recently added audiobooks so you can listen to audiobooks through the simply app of course you can mix your DRM free and licensed Ihram content in the one app so if you have commercial content and you have public domain content they all go through the same app and unlike a for-profit or commercial app it has Bret this simply is branded with your own library and with that I’m going to turn it over to James to do a demonstration all right Thank You Michelle I’m gonna switch my screen share to my phone which is currently plugged into my computer if someone can on the team can give me a thumbs up if they see the screen great thank you so this is the New York Public Library Catalog and in that catalog as you can see I can look through the different books that they’ve curated either in partnership with the community or in celebration of their anniversaries bestsellers from our favorite New York Times or their very own staff again the app will also organize it by fiction nonfiction audience and language as needed depending on what your community needs our last time what is that you didn’t see which is new is that Michelle mentioned was the addition of audiobooks that can also side-by-side be a be played and discovered through the app what the application also allows you to do is to connect to multiple libraries other than just the one library so if you are a member of different libraries or say your resident New York City and you go to a great university like Columbia University you can go between your New York Public Library Catalog and your Columbia University catalog so here is Columbia University with some books that they’ve not only acquired but also that they have digitized and hosted with partners such as the Internet Archive there’s also open access textbooks as well as some of their own published books from the Columbia University Press so within these you can see both textbooks from the open textbook project you can just simply click on a book download the book whether it’s in PDF or ePub that will render in the app you can do any standard ebook type of feature that you want like cut and paste text so that you can maybe take a snippet of text or a citation from the book and place it in your favorite note- taking app whether it be Evernote or simply just email it to yourself to some other document format it’s really that simple to access the content you simply just need to borrow the content be logged in to your library with your public library card and you can download to your heart’s content now what’s also nice about the app is again with that library card authentication this is not a commercial app where we’re taking liberties with taking personal data in the background everything in the app is built over a secure connection and with an eye towards privacy meaning we don’t capture anything that is PII we simply just anonymous when we lend out the book according to the library ID that’s on that card for that CUNY ID and Columbia’s instance all right you can do search but mostly it is a browse interface again a very simple app for public libraries the simplicity of navigation simplicity of transactional use helps us overcome issues with digital literacy and as you can expect the generations now coming into our schools have this general expectation of access over mobile just simple intuitive interfaces I will that should complete my demo of the app in we’ll now go back to the slide presentation and pass it off to the next person all right thanks James a few in addition to the work that we’ve been doing to better understand the public libraries we set out to conduct a survey with libraries to find out what academic library institutions academic libraries would want thanks to a grant from the Alfred P sloan Foundation we conducted a feasibility study and collected information from over 150 libraries and this information helped to provide us some information around what are the most frequently used features as we expect the copy paste and print is important as well as in document keyword search and table of contents navigation but we also found something that’s important for the academics that might be different than public libraries like citation creation and export many are the same needs for ebook reading that public’s have academic staff as well for example eBook viewing and bookmarking and and other types of navigation so this helped us to understand that there are some things that are coming from the public libraries that we can leverage and that there are some features that we have to work on important for academic libraries you can go to the next slide please James this survey by the way was funded by Alfred P Sloan and partners on this consisted of Columbia lyricists NYU New York Public Library the digital Public Library of America MIT press and minute X University of Minnesota the survey also told us that our users are are going to be coming from a variety of places in the institution but that the libraries thought a particular area focus are the novice undergraduates that first year and second year undergraduate student researcher is an area of focus we think that’s important because that really does cross all academic institutions in North America community colleges liberal arts colleges research institutions and of course now thinking about remote work and remote learning distance learning may be more important than ever but even when we first did the survey last year it was still 68% and of course we expect faculty and graduate students to be users as well we think that users are more likely to be informed by consumer technologies and so they are going to be influenced by what they use in the consumer marketplace when thinking about a good reading experience and the final slide and this tells us something that’s not surprising that our users are likely to be reading books on a variety of platforms yes they will continue to read on their desktops and laptops but we also see equal importance to tablets and smartphones and we see rising prominence for Chromebooks and networks so we’ll have to serve the the wide variety of devices and writing a consistent reading experience finally I’ll turn to one one last slide before I turn it back over to James we are really focusing on transitioning to an open ebook ecosystem and fortunately for us we have the IMLS the mellon Foundation is sloan Foundation and others in the community providing millions of dollars of funding to provide support for exchanges into an open ebook ecosystem these are just some of the examples of activities that have taken place since that original IMLS grant for simply e and you can see that some of this work is actually accelerating as we move into into this current era with that James you can talk about where we’re going and just unmute yourself there thank you rob was point demonstrating in another slide it really is a community effort and as you can see on our future plans it’s really the community that is pitching in to help advance this particular platform and tie it together to the different type of libraries and users across the industry that will be trying to improve eBook access so what’s of particular importance is sam’l authentication so for those of you not too familiar with or unfamiliar with sam’l sam’l is basically a protocol that provides access control and authenticates users to web applications so if you’re an enterprise IT based system like a campus or a community college your authentication is maintained and your identity is maintained by your central IT sam’l is a way to provide that user a single sign-on experience into all the different applications that that university may bring to bear on their scholarship or their student body or for their faculty and so we’re doing this in partnership with Columbia minitex and lyricists the other thing that we’re working on is enhanced local discovery and this is basically being able to provide direct download links into the discovery layers of other applications such as backlight or primo or other type of campus or university type discovery layers as well as a web catalog for those that actually don’t have one of those systems maybe in a community college or a local City College and then lastly rediem - it’s the next iteration and advancement of the rendering engine for ePub it also supports PDF and will also support some fixed layout forms such as graphic novella we will be we are working with some the New York Public Library to help application to be able to use radium 2 with a different and DRM providers that are coming online as well as some of the legacy providers that proliferate the industry and then as always content is king so will be an ongoing partnership with Columbia working with the different content providers to make that content available through the simply e app and then lastly DRM everyone’s favorite topic there is an open DRM being produced by radium called license content protection and our partners at amigos library network are doing the first proof-of-concept evaluation of that technology for use and simply so if anything that you heard today was compelling or intrigued you you can reach out to us via these this variety of channels so you can either participate just be informed or join in the discussion or better yet join in the development of the simply app for academics and at that we’d like to open it up to questions from the online community well that was really interesting thank you to the three of you for that presentation it’s been really interesting to watch simply II come along I just paste it into the chat box a link to the video of the presentation you gave in 2017 so I think it’s really interesting to see what kind of features you’re adding and how it’s developing so with that I want to go ahead and open the floor for questions and we already have a couple of questions so let me pass one of those along to you the question is isn’t this an app that could be integrated into my University’s existing mobile services app where our library already has a presence or must it be a standalone app that’s that’s a great question James can answer this a little bit further but this is an open zone really this is an open source platform for the most part it’s a standalone app as it’s currently being distributed from NYPL but that doesn’t preclude an institution from taking the code and adapting it for local need our goal for academic use is to ensure that all of the software stack that’s associated with the functionality for academic institutions will all be open-source so with that in mind someone could adapt it and incorporate it into something else whether that’s practical or makes sense I would leave that to the application developer I’ll just comment in the public library space there are public libraries that have apps for their library and they’ve integrated the simply app into that app so it’s like that’s a button in the library app which then launches a simply app so depending on what kind of integration you’re looking for I can tell you that’s been done oh that’s great and this really neat and those those apps are really popular in the public libraries we also had a thank you for the demo that was a very helpful demo and I just want to remind everyone if you have a question there’s a Q&A box at the bottom of your zoom screen if you just want to type your question in there we will get to it or you can share it on chat as well and moving on to our next question I see the simply an Internet Archive are open to all what other libraries are open to everyone through the app it’s a good question so the digital Public Library of America is open to everyone we have 6,500 free books in there that you can read on the app the other libraries that are in the app you just need a library card so if you see your library just sign up for a library card and you will be able to see the books that your library is providing and for Columbia we’re working with lyricists and DPLA and amigos in Minnesota to actually select certain collections that we can load we’re looking at licensed collections from some selected ebook providers we’re also looking at open access collections and our own digitized collections as was mentioned Internet Archive is available to all we’re exploring Oh a pen org the directory of open access books and Oh a pen org and we’re planning to load all of those books into simply for Columbia I would imagine once that’s been done that feed could be made available for others and we’re in conversations with other major providers of of books that could be made more broadly available including Conte trust where we think there’s a tremendous opportunity for sharing out the hoti trust books through simply e-platform and they’ve been very receptive to the conversation but they’ve been a little busy these days working on the emergency temporary access services etas service that we’re all benefiting from and we hope to restore that conversation with them once the their current efforts wind down that sounds fabulous if I can expand a little bit on that question what does how would that present to the end user if you’re affiliated with the university but you also have your local library card when you go in and you search simply for something you know a subject matter or something like that is is it opaque to you where the resources coming from once you’re logged in with your credentials or do you have to search each individual affiliation our goal and I can’t speak for other academic institutions it’s very early but our goal is actually provide discovery through our our search and discovery interface for Columbia which is called Clio our black light based interface in that space we have 1600 databases we have licensed content we have open content we have public domain content government content you name it it’s there so there is a certain level of trans people ready it’s just that in one in some particular cases those books will also be available via simply e and you would click a link and the book will show up and simply I see I think the user can look deeper to find out where it comes from and how we licensed it but they shouldn’t have a different user experience because we chose a different business model or different parts to get it that part should be hidden away the experience should be consistent no matter where it came from Michelle you’re dealing with this as well how are you seeing it for DPLA yeah well and maybe dad answer your question in a different way so if I’m in New York and I recorded the New York Public Library and I’m going to Columbia I will need to log into both and then both libraries will be under my accounts and then I’d have to click in each individually to find the resource so they’re not merged and I think because of privacy in authentication all that but they both become your accounts so you don’t have to continue to log back into them but you do have to search each separately I see okay that helps that helps that’s really interesting thank you thanks for that for both of those answers and now we have a question from from clifford cliff lynched what is asking if you could speak a little bit to mathematics support and also the support of illustrated materials right I’ll take that one if folks can hear you my internet connections little spotty right now we use the reading rendering engine and they are working with the broader community to solve the challenge of math equations and rendering ebooks they’re looking at math XML Oh Matt Matt Jax which is a JavaScript engine that can actually render the true equation so that you can read back the equation as opposed to having a picture in a book of an equation so that’s where the technology is going it’s not in the app at this moment with the rendering engine but with the implementation of our to the ability to make those advancements are going to be coming in the next couple of years and as far as pictures it does support pictures within the content already if you’re talking about anything like annotation or any other type of notation within the pictures like triple if’ I don’t believe that support is in there at this moment great very helpful thank you we do have maybe a minute more for question if anyone else has any other questions they’d like to ask our panelists I’d also like to just let you know that if you would like to make a comment or engage directly with our panelists feel free to raise your your virtual hand and I can move you into the space where I can unmute your microphone and you can engage directly with them or feel free to type your question into the Q&A or the chat just one second to remind you that this is part of CNI ongoing spring 2020 virtual meeting we’re delighted that you could join us today and we have many more webinars yet to come we hope that you will come back and experience more of our content in the weeks ahead and I’m just trying to get a copy of our of the the URL for the schedule here which I see is not really cooperating here we go I’m just gonna paste it into the chat box there so you can take a look at the the webinars that will follow this one all the way through the end of May and I see we have another question now and the question is UVA hotty trust Bookshare I a and a few other academic institutions are working on making remediate texts available has there been any discussion about serving that type of content what’s remediate texts let’s see Robin if you could just expand a little bit on what you have in mind when you refer to remediate texts what while she’s doing that I’ll just mention we’re planning to go live with a pilot for Columbia a limited production system in the fall of 2020 if there is any body on the chat that’s interested in participating in this expansion or you serve simply for academics we’d love to hear from you you can put it in the chat box we’d love to hear that in terms of accessibility James maybe you wanna talk about accessibility thank you for that yes as far as sex accessibility again radium is where we leverage that community in the development that is really focused on making epubs more accessible as a format when they’re founding members the Daisy consortium is a development partner with them to make to be able to design the technologies so that it can actually present the underlying text to the rendering engine engine and the platform so that the any onboard assistive technologies like for iOS which would be voice over or for Android which would be talkback would be available to those systems so that you could actually read and navigate the book we’re just using touch and gesture and not have to actually be able to see the content so yes success accessibility is something that we built into the app by design starting back in 2015 in the technology selections for the firm reading wonderful that’s terrific thank you for that question Robin and we have a comment oh that’s from you James math ml support on road map for radium did I pronounce that right that’s correct I was just putting in a writing the answer to cliffs question got it okay excellent okay well with that I would like to thank our panelists once again for coming to CNI and talking to us about simply II thank you so much for your time and I’d also like to thank all of our attendees for taking the time to join us here we’re so glad you could come we hope you’ll come back for more webinars through CNI virtual Spring Meeting we hope that everyone will be well and that we’ll see you again soon take care everyone .