E-books could transform teaching and study. Collections are growing steadily but no in-depth user studies have yet been carried out. Chris Armstrong, Ray Lonsdale and Dave Nicholas introduce the SuperBook Project that aims to put that right.

E-books have slipped quietly onto the scene with little of the fanfare surrounding other electronic information resources - both earlier formats (e-journals) and the more recent (blogs). E-book publishing has been growing rapidly and the International Digital Publishing Forum1 reports a 23 per cent increase in e-book revenues in 2005 compared to 2004 and a 20 per cent increase in e-book titles published year-on-year. In addition, aggregator initiatives, as well as considerable attention from all sectors of the library world (Net Library now boasts more than 100,000 titles and has been licensed by two major UK consortia as well as many individual libraries), attest to faith in the format's viability.

Little research
Initiatives by Google and Amazon, together with free e-books, make the headlines but despite the evident successes of the last decade, e-books continue to excite little comment in professional journals and have attracted relatively little research funding. And yet e-books have the potential to transform the ways in which teachers teach and students study. The success of desk-bound e-books can only be increased by new developments such as the new e-paper e-book readers from iRex and Sony, which move the market directly to users, and which will speed up the progress of e-book assimilation.

With e-books available directly from anywhere on or off campus, and portable readers capable of holding more than 100 books, the traditional academic library will need to examine the way it manages and delivers book collections. It is the users who will drive the e-book story forward; and, unlike earlier formats, no one is watching the users of this new breed of `super books'.

For example, between 1999 and 2004, the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) funded a major study of the provision and use of electronic resources in UK higher and further education - the Justeis project. It found that many of the sophisticated e-resources being made available were little or never used, particularly by undergraduate and postgraduate students2. The main reasons were the lack of promotion and the lack of information skills training. A point possibly not made as forcibly in successive years as in the first was that many resources (e.g. gateways, portals, subject collections, aggregations of resources) were put in place with little or no user evaluation - it was simply assumed that if a demonstrably invaluable resource was made available, it would be used.


The SuperBook Project
Since 2000 Professor Dave Nicholas and his colleagues at the Department of Information Studies (DIS) at UCL have been applying new methodologies to user studies in the field of electronic journals, leading to a better understanding of the behaviour of the `virtual scholar'. The evaluations have been based on deep-log analysis of the digital `fingerprints' left by the users of e-journals. In late 2005 discussions took place between Professors Dave Nicholas and Anthony Watkinson (DIS), Chris Armstrong (IAL), Ray Lonsdale (UWA) and Professor Barrie Gunter from the University of Leicester to explore the feasibility of combining research methodologies in a study of e-book usage, the SuperBook Project. This is the first time that this confluence of methodologies has been applied to the field of e-books, using the UCL community as a test bed. The SuperBook Project is the first large-scale national user study of e-book use by academic staff and students in higher and further education institutions in the UK.

SuperBook will:

• provide UCL Library Services and academic staff with information on student take-up and use of e-books, enabling them to devise appropriate selection and acquisition policies, and to develop pertinent collections. Library staff also need help in establishing effective promotional activities to exploit their e-book collections
• help the library profession re-evaluate existing information literacy programmes with a view to improving the skills base of students
• illuminate the issues surrounding the integration of e-books within e-learning. Already, some institutions are beginning to integrate e-books within virtual learning environments, and how this can be achieved, as well as the efficacy of the result, is of concern to both academic and UCL Library Services staff
• inform academic staff in their choices about scholarly publishing, and in the selection of e-books for use by students
• inform the publishing industry of the attitudes towards e-books and offer insights into their authorship and design.

A central hypothesis of the study is that a huge shift in user behaviour may be about to occur as a result of the mass availability of e-books. SuperBook will be a major funded project and, consequently, it was felt that a preliminary study should be undertaken to offer data for a substantive proposal. The preliminary study will be a case study of usage through UCL Library Services. The primary aim is to create a live research laboratory at UCL which puts e-books through their paces. From this laboratory, academics, publishers, users and librarians can learn and exchange information, while contributing ideas to be tested. The survey population will comprise UCL students, researchers and academic staff from certain subject groups, who will be exposed to a significant and relevant collection of more than 3,000 e-books contributed by three publishers - Oxford Scholarship Online, Wiley Interscience, and Taylor & Francis. The study will evaluate awareness of, and attitudes towards, e-books, the impact of e-book intervention on learning, book usage, satisfaction with e-book content, and whether, as a result of these interventions, users demonstrate different patterns of study from the non-users. Possible interventions will include: cataloguing of e-books, making e-book recommendations to staff by librarians and to students by course leaders; subject librarians acting as advocates; links added to online reading lists, and links from the online resources area of the library's website. Essentially, the study will test whether or how scholars take to the e-books offered to them, in what ways, and with what impacts (i.e. impact on their usage of other information resources). A secondary aim is to investigate the management of e-book collections. The study will explore issues such as bibliographic control, selection and acquisition, licensing, modes of access, and promotion.


Methodology
The preliminary study will combine quantitative and qualitative methodologies. Deep-log analysis (an analysis of the raw logs) of user transactions can offer insights into resource use, and a rich picture of usage trends and user needs can be obtained when it is used in conjunction with qualitative research. It has been used successfully in e-journal studies conducted as part of CIBER's Virtual Scholar Research Programme and is currently being used in a US government-funded research project, MaxData, investigating the use of digital journals available on OhioLINK3, 4. The California State University's e-book project5 used simple log analysis (e.g. activity-by-title and popular e-books reports) and a user satisfaction survey for a single e-book supplier. For the purposes of this study, we think it would be more appropriate to use an approach refined from the log analysis of the SuperJournal project6. A steering group has been established comprising representatives from the publishers, UCL Library Services. the newly-formed Centre for Publishing at UCLthe University of Wales Aberystwyth, Information Automation Ltd and Leicester University. The project goes live on 1 November 2006 and will run for one year. Funding comes from publishers Emerald and Wiley, and other organisations are expected to come on board in the next six months. Additional funding is also anticipated from the University of Wales, Aberystwyth.

An e-book equivalent of the SuperJournal project is long overdue. Justeis demonstrated that ad hoc provision of resources is ill-conceived and pointless; if limited library resources are to be spent on appropriate and usable (thus used e-books over the next few years, the need for a SuperBook project is inescapable. Equally, it is important to understand that significant take-up of e-books within HE communities could lead to a paradigm shift influencing e-learning, research and the nature of academic publishing.


References
1 Industry eBook Sales Statistics 2005, International Digital Publishing Forum, 2006.
2 Christine Urquhart and others, Uptake and use of electronic information services: trends in UK higher education from the Justeis project, Program 37 (3), 2003, pp.168-180.
3 David Nicholas and others, The Big Deal: ten years on, Learned Information 18(4) October 2005, pp.251-257.
4 David Nicholas, Paul Huntington and Anthony Watkinson, Scholarly journal usage: the results of deep log analysis, Journal of Documentation 61(2), 2005, pp.248-280.
5 CSU e-Book Pilot Project Final Report, California State University, 2002.
6 Ken Eason, Sue Richardson and Liangzhi Yu, Patterns of use of electronic journals, Journal of Documentation 56 (5), 2000, pp.477-504.

(Page is maintained by Ian Rowlands. Last updated 24 October 2007).