From: "Hamaker, Charles" <[log in to unmask]> Date: Mon, 8 Feb 2016 15:54:02 -0500 Dear Liblicense-l Readers, We appreciate the comments and positive reception our project description is receiving. We’ve elected to respond collectively, and would like to remind you that we noted having more questions than answers at this early stage of our work. That said, here are some responses. A few responses have come to us directly and we will be responding to those as directly at a later date. *Website*- thanks Eugenia Beh for the alert. The old link works for us but here’s a new link. We are investigating setting up our own listserv and creating a mailing list, but aren’t there yet. http://guides.library.uncc.edu/charlotteinitiative *Publisher Assurance of Perpetuity*, Jim O’Donnell: Thanks Jim for advancing the conversation with a serious academic publisher. We’re glad to have other interested parties taking up similar conversations and look forward to hearing more when you’re ready to report. *Proprietary formats,* Toby Green: We used proprietary formats to mean Adobe Digital Editions and its cousins. For non-proprietary formats, at this time, we think the work of the IDPF (http://idpf.org/epub in developing and enhancing the the EPUB 3.0 standard to support the full scholarly apparatus is the most promising option. There are many valid reasons for slow uptake but our project in part hopes to build consensus for next steps among the academic library and publishing community. None of us are experts in this technical area, so we are grateful for your offer of help. *ILL and Accessibility,* Linda Wobbe: We are addressing both of these topics. The User Experience Research Team will address accessibility. The Licensing Principles Team is taking up ILL. As a first step, we will collect ILL data for university press titles to see if we can discern an impact on sales. We are preparing a manual and script for data collection from ILLiad so we can have standardized data to examine. We are some months away but will share the manual and script once have it finalized. *Faculty and Student Feedback*, Rick Anderson: Here’s a longer description of the ebook feedback we’ve received at UNC Charlotte. We received strongly worded messages from faculty about limited access titles -- they told their students not to use those ebooks at all. Students complained constantly about limited use titles. Our collection development group engaged with faculty and R&I librarians and agreed it was better to remove titles from the catalog with those restrictions rather than deal with the frustrations of students and faculty. We now purchase ebooks only from approved vendors and do not rent ebook collections for non-permanent access. We purchase ebooks that do meet our criteria, such as collections from Project MUSE and Springer or individual titles from Elsevier, OUP, etc. We promote these ebooks to faculty, encouraging them to make assignments from titles that will remain in our collection. These unlimited use models are proving to be less expensive on a per title basis than multi-user models. You can see the full list of titles we support including some collections, or can purchase easily at: http://library.uncc.edu/et/ You didn’t ask directly how we respond to requests for a specific title. If we can obtain the ebook from an approved vendor or directly from the publisher we do so. If not, we may purchase print or use ILL to borrow print. We don’t want to be forced to settle for an ebook with unacceptable restrictions. How else can we make our case to providers? Some of our Working Group members take differing approaches. Some report positive experiences with limited use titles and have found partial solutions to some of the restrictions (on ownership, or full searching or archiving, plus silo-ing etc.) that UNC Charlotte finds objectionable. Working Group members may make exceptions to specific title requests and some subscribe to limited time aggregations. That’s a decision each library must make based on its own budget, collecting strengths, curriculum and other variable factors. Our research teams will investigate various approaches and issues, supplemented by research reports and literature reviews. For example, we believe UX is critical for understanding these issues. *Course Use, Unlimited Access, OER,* Sandy Thatcher: We are conducting a dialogue with our publisher members, all current press directors, to determine what business models and pricing options would be required to support unlimited access to their purchased ebooks. Our experience is that some students prefer the print option even when OER or other unlimited access versions exist. So there's an opportunity for print copies from publishers even if campus wide ebook access is available. In our experience they aren't mutually exclusive. Even when a free ebook is available, some students (as many as 30% from one class) will prefer to purchase print copies if they are available, while for another class none purchased the bookstore print copy. These data come from collaborative research with the bookstore, which we hope to replicate and expand. Another approach could be for university presses and libraries to collaborate in the creation of OERs. Again, it is early days in our work. Thanks again for your interest, Chuck Hamaker, Principal Investigator, UNC Charlotte, [log in to unmask] October Ivins, Charlotte Initiative Consultant, [log in to unmask] Alison Bradley, Head of Research and Instructional Services UNC Charlotte, [log in to unmask] Liz Siler, Collection Development Librarian UNC Charlotte, [log in to unmask]