HERON - a progress report
The HERON Project aims to provide a national service to the Higher Education community for copyright clearance, digitisation and delivery of book extracts and journal articles and to build up a national database and resource bank of electronic texts.
The provision of such a service will facilitate both the access to and use of digitised material. HERON will therefore enable its members to widen access to course materials, improve library services to students and encourage the use of technology to support improvements in learning and teaching throughout Higher Education in the UK.
Background to the HERON Project
Changes in Higher Education in the last decade have meant that effective provision of access to learning materials using traditional print based methods is increasingly difficult. The importance of harnessing the power and flexibility of technology to overcome these problems was first widely recognised by the Follett Report, from which the whole eLib programme has grown. More recently, the views expressed in the Follett Report have been endorsed by the recommendations of the Dearing Report, which was especially concerned with removing barriers to Higher Education and which saw technology as the key instrument which could provide the means of overcoming obstacles to access by non-traditional students.
HERON, which is a phase III eLib Project, has grown out of this background and has drawn upon the experiences gained by previous eLib projects in the field of ‘On Demand Publishing’ and ‘Electronic Reserve’ (OD/ER). However, the direct inspiration for the project came from the findings of one of the eLib supporting studies, The Impact of On-Demand Publishing and Electronic Reserve on Students, Teaching and Libraries in Higher Education in the UK. This study showed that the biggest negative factors which were slowing the adoption of the use of digitised texts were:
The Impact Study recommended that:
In response to these findings JISC agreed to fund the HERON project and it is these recommendations which form the core of the HERON Project’s remit.
The HERON Project
The HERON Project was established in August 1998 and is run by a consortium of University of Stirling, Napier University, South Bank University and Blackwell Retail Ltd. and is jointly funded by JISC and Blackwell Retail Ltd. From the outset, it was the intention that HERON should move from a project to a continuing service basis and it is therefore receiving diminishing funding across its three project years.
During the first year the detail of the project was worked through and the software which handles requests to HERON was developed. Year 2, 1999 /2000 was the major pilot year during which the HERON Service was market tested by 17 universities and colleges which were of all sizes and ages and which were widely spread across the UK. In return for a highly subsidised service, the pilot sites provided, and continue to provide, a huge amount of invaluable feedback on the practical use of the HERON Service by HEIs. During that period the HERON Team too were discovering which aspects of their part of the service worked well and which needed improvements.
HERON is now entering its third year and is actively seeking new members from the UK HE community. The new and developing field within which HERON is working is changing so rapidly that there will inevitably be ongoing changes (and improvements) in the service HERON provides to member universities and colleges. Continued Project status also means that the service HERON offers will continue to be significantly subsidised for the coming year (2000/01). This will give universities and colleges interested in joining HERON the opportunity to do so at a reduced rate enabling them to carry out their own pilot studies on providing access to digitised texts.
How does HERON work?
HEIs are invited to become subscribing members of the HERON Service and individual users from each HEI are given a user name and password which enables them to access HERON’s web based request system. Users may then request copyright clearance for their chosen materials. HERON will pursue clearances, working both with the CLA and with individual publishers and rightsholders. Once HERON has been given copyright clearance, an estimate of the total costs to the requesting university are worked out. (This figure will include the copyright fee, the digitisation costs and the HERON administrative charge). Users are informed of the estimated costs and given the opportunity at that stage to accept or reject the offer. If they accept, the material is digitised and the request is delivered to the user in its final format. (PDF Normal was the original format but after testing and endorsement by the HERON test sites, the standard format is now PDF Image.) Users then have a 14 day approval period in which they can assess the material and, if it is not of an acceptable standard, they have the right to return it.
HERON also provides its members with considerable support. There are free HERON Induction and Training days for new members and the HERON Technical Unit at Napier University offers guidance and support on any technical issues related to the mounting and use of HERON materials. HERON also has a closed discussion list ‘lis-hug’, which is used largely for dissemination of information and news by HERON to its members but which can also be used by members for requests for advice and for discussion of related matters. HERON also holds User Group meetings throughout the year to which representatives of all member universities and colleges are invited. Finally, HERON members are also invited to email or phone the HERON team if they have any urgent problems.
Key features of the HERON Service
The HERON Service has certain unique features:
Facts from the HERON pilot year
During its pilot year HERON received approximately 2,600 requests for extracts for digitisation. The subject areas which received the greatest numbers of requests were:
In dealing with these requests, HERON approached over 440 publishers of whom approximately 60% were UK based and 30% were USA based.
Publishers who gave clearance permission mainly did so on either the ‘per student per page’ or the ‘flat fee’ basis. Of those charging on the ‘per student per page’ basis - the majority (approx. 75% ) used the standard 5p per-student per-page rate. It is more difficult to give any averages for the ‘flat fee’ charges as they were so variable but approximately 12% of requests were cleared free of charge.
HERON has also already been successful in persuading several publishers to reduce their copyright fees.
Who Benefits from HERON?
One of the major aims of HERON is that all the stakeholders should benefit from its work. This includes not only students, the end users of the services which HERON supplies, but also academic staff, library staff, publishers and other rightsholders.
Students
The changing profile and lifestyle of students in UK HE today means that they are spending less and less time on campus. Part time and mature students frequently have jobs and family responsibilities which severely restrict their opportunities to visit the university campus to use the learning support facilities traditionally offered there. Even the ‘traditional’, full time students are increasingly working to support their studies and they too have less time to spare to get to the library. Many universities are providing increasing numbers of courses for distance learning students and in many cases providing a time consuming and expensive paper based postal service to support them. (One university which is currently expanding in this area reckons to spend an average of £50 per distance learning student on postage alone.)
Provision of digitised learning materials allows students to study both at a time and at a location which is convenient to them. Digitised materials provided by HERON can be used very flexibly – they can be viewed on screen, downloaded to disc or printed out. Students can also learn at a pace which suits them, returning to the material as often as they need to for no additional cost. HERON is not a pay per view service. Once the material is licensed to the university it may be used by students on the relevant course as frequently as they wish (as long as it is within the period for which the university has been given a licence to use the material).
Academic staff
Both academic staff, and universities as a whole, benefit from use of digitised materials because it enables them to provide equality of access to learning, whether it be across sites, for large groups, distance learners or for students studying whilst on work based courses away from the campus. It enables the construction of flexible learning courses tailored to the needs of specific groups of students and the implied requirement that students extend their C&IT skills to access these resources, helps to support desirable learning outcomes such as the development of transferable skills. This flexibility both in access and content is also ideal for those involved in widening access schemes and the improvement in standards of access is important in satisfying QA requirements.
By using digitised texts, academic staff can provide access for students to their personal selection of texts, whether they are in - or out of print. Use of electronic ‘course packs’ also has the very direct benefit for academic staff that students come to lectures and tutorials better prepared and staff time is not wasted in explanations or providing additional copies of key texts.
Informal feed-back to HERON has already shown that, where course materials are provided electronically and their use is promoted by the academic staff concerned, students are enthusiastic about these changes it and have asked for an extension of such provision to other courses.
Library staff
Digital provision of learning materials has enormous benefits for library staff. The provision of short loan collections and extended services at the weekends and in the evenings has not, in general, satisfied student demands for improved access to the texts they need. Use of digitised resources means that key texts can be delivered to many students simultaneously and can be accessed without a student needing to come to the library. As a result, students get the material they want, and damage and loss to library stock is eliminated - as is the need to spend time looking for, repairing or re-ordering and processing lost or damaged material.
Time is also saved if staff do not have to undertake the complex process of copyright clearance themselves and staff can also be confident that compliance with copyright conditions are assured where material is ordered through the HERON Service.
Publishers and other rightsholders
HERON’s commitment to providing benefits to all stakeholders extends to publishers and rightsholders as well as to the HE community. HERON works strongly in providing a pressure group on behalf of HE in its work with rightsholders however, it is also committed to raising awareness amongst HEIs on behalf of rightsholders and ensuring that they too receive a fair return.
HERON therefore takes a non-confrontational approach to rightsholders and acknowledges their real concerns when confronting issues of digitisation of existing printed texts about loss of sales revenue and about loss of control over the content of their material. In a very new and fluid situation rightsholders are looking to HERON to provide information and feedback on the requirements of their academic market. HERON is working to reassure all rightsholders and to demonstrate that there is a secure means of distributing electronic texts to students and one which offers them new marketing opportunities within HE.
HERON's Future
There is already considerable interest in the HERON Service both within the UK and beyond and HERON is currently investigating the possibility of extending its service to the FE sector. We expect the coming year to be an exciting one. The movement towards the use of digitised texts for learning and teaching purposes is dynamic Significant developments in the publishing industry, in available C&IT as well as amongst the academic sector have been made during HERON’s pilot year and there is no reason to expect that change in the coming year will be any slower. Membership of HERON is enabling HEIs to work together and learn from each other to achieve the cultural, organisational and technical changes necessary to make the achievement of the digital library a reality.
At the time of writing, at the start of the HERON’s second year of service, take up of the
places offered to UK HEIs has been very rapid. If you would like to get further information
on the HERON Project please visit our
Sally Curry, HERON Liaison Officer