From: "Wise, Alicia (ELS-OXF)" <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Mon, 12 Dec 2016 17:48:56 +0000

Hi Jim,

Not really my area of expertise, but I quickly touched base with the
very knowledgeable Graham Bell (copied here) and asked him a question
about whether ONIX for Books might help with at least some of these
challenges.  Apparently it could.  So for example, there are data
elements that can clarify the ‘technological’ aspects of file format,
reading system requirements and so on, and there are data elements
that can list some of the major usage constraints / conditions, and
there are data elements that can point to a full license.

But there are open questions on whether publishers provide the
necessary level of detail in their ONIX for Book feeds at the minute,
and about whether libraries receive/ingest ONIX for Books metadata.
He has apparently seen "an uptick in interest in ONIX from libraries
and more specifically from library systems suppliers (e.g. Innovative,
Sirsi Dynix)" which is potentially interesting and helpful.

More information about ONIX for Books is available here:
http://www.editeur.org/83/Overview/

With best wishes,
Alicia

-----Original Message-----
From: "Jim O'Donnell" <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Sun, 11 Dec 2016 14:02:15 -0700

Jill O'Neill of NISO has an interesting place from which to observe
the various insanities and inanities of the market in what publishers
and libraries persist in calling "ebooks" and she has an excellent
posting on the Scholarly Kitchen on the theme:

https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2016/12/05/monographs-transparency-and-open-access/

Observe that it's not just that "discovery tools" fail in this case
(without a lot of hunter-gatherer work on the user's part), but they
fail because traditional metadata don't capture quite enough:  we
don't want merely title, author, keywords/subjects, and similar
information, but we also want to know things about conditions of
access.  If we're lucky, it's as simple as OA/Paywall, but in this
case it's something that happens to be OA on a site that has a range
of kinds of materials, and the first discovery tool in fact
misinformed her about the conditions she would find there -- and it
was only stubborn persistence that got to the final revelation.  So
this is a case where the issues are one part technology of ebook and
two parts legal/contractual questions of access to resources.  What
will make progress happen?

Jim O'Donnell
ASU