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Important:
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Digital History Books Project:
Overview
With the advent of the World Wide Web, books have found a medium of distribution that could scarcely be imagined even a few years ago. Not only has the Web provided an unprecedented means of access, it has also spurred the creation of new technologies that can alter the very idea of a text and its uses in scholarship.
This is the context of the OUP/Penn Digital Books project--a collaborative effort by a major publisher and research library to study the impact of digital books on teaching, research, and learning. With financial support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the project will examine and evaluate:
- the interaction of students and faculty with a certain corpus of books online;
- the cost and mechanics of digital book production and distribution;
- the impact of digital book availability on the demand and market for print materials, and possible new publisher services, such as print on demand;
- the potential of full-text monographs to advance scholarship, at least within history and related areas of the humanities.
As an aid to the controlled study of these issues, the OUP is granting the Penn community unlimited access to the full set of project texts, a collection anticipated to number between 1,500 and 2,000 books over the next five years. A public site will offer the full text of sample books, to acquaint a wider audience with the project's goals and the design concepts it employs.
In the opening phase of the project, the Library will establish baseline indicators of patron expectation and behavior with respect to accessing and using books online. As the collection reaches a critical mass, server logs will provide information about use, and the Library will conduct surveys and focus group sessions to measure interest in the project and satisfaction with its products. In the end, Penn and OUP hope to have sufficient empirical data to begin answering some critical questions about desktop access to scholarly monographs:
- Are digitized monographs useful for the academic work of scholars, and if so, in what ways?
- How do the uses of digitized and print monographs relate? Does one supplement or displace the other, and if so, how?
- How does the availability of project texts affect the demand for and sales of print copies? Will the digitized version of a book increase or diminish demand for print copies? Will increase of demand accelerate sales to consumers and to libraries under pressure to add copies?
- How effective is the presentation of project texts? Do the methods used enhance or detract from the usefulness of the texts? What did the project reveal about valued-added features, such as hypertext linkages, indexing, and book marking?
- How effective are the pdf format and the Acrobat Reader for delivery of long texts? What improvements of these technologies do we recommend based on project outcomes?
- How efficient and clear are the Web interface design, site organization, locator tools, help, and linkages to related full text sources, such as cited references.
- Is digital book production, following the parameters of this project, cost effective for publishers and libraries? Are digital books cost beneficial for customers? and
- How should publishers create, package and distribute digital books for sale to libraries and other customers?
Publishers and libraries are negotiating a transition in the way they do
business and the ways customers use and perceive their products. Through this
project, the participants hope to improve public awareness and understanding of
that transition, and to test the potential of collaborative efforts, among
information providers, for strengthening the tools of scholarship.
Copyright © 1998-2002 University of Pennsylvania Library. All Rights Reserved.
Access to books available on this site is restricted to the faculty, students and staff of the University of Pennsylvania, and Bryn Mawr, Haverford, and Swarthmore Colleges. See the statement of use restrictions.