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