Presentation given by Carolyn Rowlinson at the TECUP Workshop, 29 October 1999, Deutsche Bibliothek, Frankfurt am Main, Germany
Introduction
HERON is a project within the UK Electronic Libraries Programme, ( eLib)1 designed to widen access to recommended reading for students, by developing alternatives to traditional library provision.
The project partners are: University of Stirling, Napier University, South Bank University, and Blackwell Retail Ltd. The three University Partners have all been involved in previous eLib on-demand or electronic reserve (OD/ER) projects: Stirling and Napier were lead partners in the Scottish Collaborative On-demand Publishing Enterprise (SCOPE), while South Bank University in London was involved in the Phoenix project. HERON's commercial partner: Blackwell Retail Ltd, has over eighty academic bookshops in the UK. HERON's funding comes from the Joint Information Systems Committee of the Higher Education Funding Councils (JISC) (£450,000), and £384,000 is being contributed by Blackwell's. The project started in August 1998, with service under way by autumn 1999, for the start of the 1999/2000 academic year. Our ambitious objective is to become self-supporting by August 2001, with a service available to all Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) in the UK. HERON's aims are to:Format
Rightsholders wish exact page replication, yet bandwidth within HEIs precludes the use of image files. The solution is to use scanning software such as Adobe Capture™, which produces searchable files very similar to the original text. Where text cannot be scanned properly, an image of the original text is dropped in (although there is always a small danger of false positives). Compulsory headers are required giving bibliographic and rights information, as well as warning that the text is not original. Artistic works within texts Currently the CLA and DACS, the Design and Artists Copyright Society are still in negotiation over the licensing of photographs, figures, diagrams and graphs which are not considered part of the literary text (as are tables), but as artistic works. Although in many instances, the rightsholders will be the authors or publishers, the CLA cannot licence the inclusion of these until agreement is reached with DACS. HERON avoids this problem by approaching rightsholders directly, and should therefore be advised if necessary to obtain any separate clearances from contributors holding artistic rights. Obtaining original copy to digitise To offer a streamlined digitisation service, HERON must be able to obtain copies of original text rapidly, and does this through the British Library Document Supply Service, at Boston Spa. Costs are higher than originally envisaged, as we must pay copyright fees in each case - even although the requesting HEI may have a copy of the original in stock, and is likely to have to pay royalty fees for each student in a class. Payment models We feel frustrated that virtually no publisher has opted for the library substitution model for clearance through the CLA for any category of publication, and as a result HEIs find themselves paying clearance fees for every student in a class, even although there is a strong body of evidence from earlier eLib OD/ER projects to show that the odds on every member of a class reading each recommended text is very small - indeed, the proportion is more likely to be under 50%. This is a phenomenon well known to most librarians working in higher education in the UK. As a result, HEIs are paying relatively high fees in total, irrespective of usage levels. While HEIs are very keen to experiment with electronic delivery to students, they recognise that there is no possibility of large scale provision until either fees are brought down below the 5 pence per page per student default price, or publishers become sufficiently confident to opt for the library substitution model in respect of a large number of monographs and journals. HERON intends to work hard to demonstrate to rightsholders that new approaches are necessary - and indeed, has had some success in obtaining clearances for journal articles on a library substitution basis by approaching rightsholders directly. We are not yet downhearted: we feel that the willingness of many hundreds of publishers to sign retrodigitisation mandates is a significant progress in itself. We also recognise that conditions for delivery have few restrictions, thus reducing overheads in administration within each university. Ownership versus access A final point worth noting at this stage is that no publisher is permitting ownership of retrodigitised files, since the version of the library substitution model adopted by the CLA is time limited to five years. HERON as a Trusted Repository HERON has also been involved in separate negotiations with the CLA to become a Trusted Repository and licensing agent. An agreement has not yet been finalised but it is hoped that we shall be permitted to store digitised texts originally licensed by the CLA in trust for the HE community. We expect also to be able to license them for reuse. Future plans HERON wishes to develop other services useful to both HEIs and rightsholders. We expect that there will be more emphasis on the direct supply of electronic text, rather than retrodigitised material as publishers store increasing volumes of text electronically. They save in warehousing costs while preventing the need for books to go out of print, and we would hope that clearance costs will reduce correspondingly. More attention will be given to making available HEI-owned texts, where rightsholders will be able to set their own royalty rates. It should be noted that we do not intend to compete with the publishing sector, but to make available quality material produced in HE which might not be viable for commercial publishers. Within the UK the boundary between Higher and Further Education is becoming blurred and we intend to investigate whether a service to the FE sector would be feasible. We should also like to ensure that visually impaired students could benefit from HERON services. Whatever the future holds, HERON is committed to maintaining the momomentum of earlier eLib OD/ER projects, and to playing a significant part in facilitating the introduction of large-scale electronic student text provision within British unversities.
References
1. http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/services/elib (eLib home page)
2. http://www.cla.co.uk (CLA home page)
3. http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/services/elib/papers/pa/charging/ Charging Mechanism for Digitised Texts by Mark Bide, Charles Oppenheim and Anne Ramsden (Second Supporting Study for the JISC/PA)