Ebrary, ebooks and libraries

James Bennett will shortly be representing ebrary in the Australasian marketplace.  As many of our libraries would know, ebrary has had a close working relationship with our parent company - Baker & Taylor - for years.  James Bennett has been working with ebrary on integration for the ANZ region for several months now and we're pleased to be adding another market-leading ebook platform to our stable.  Contact us today to discuss James Bennett selecting, profiling and purchasing ebrary titles on your library's behalf.  You can call your nominated Customer Co-ordinator or email our dedicated eResources team.

For those of you wanting to know what took us so long - well, it's been a challenge integrating ebrary into the James Bennett system.  This is not due to our close and long-standing relationship with our other ebook vendor, EBL, but due to the use of the ISBN as the primary identifier in the James Bennett database. Publishers generally use one e-ISBN across multiple ebook systems and platforms.  Our database links one ISBN to a vendor and our IT team has spent years working their way through all the e-ISBN issues including pricing, markets, special prices, loans/rentals, and more.  We won't go into details today but you can probably imagine our relief this project is nearly finished and we can represent many more digital products in future.

That said, we have represented ebrary's subscription product for public libraries for over 12 months.  That was easy to manage in the database and through our Standing Orders area. Contact your account representative for a demo or contact the eResources team to set up a trial for you.

So, want to know more about ebrary?  Here's just a snapshot!

Key features and benefits

• Works on multiple devices
• Contextual linking across multiple online resources with InfoTools™
• Unique ability to upload and integrate a library’s own digital content with DASH! and Software as a Service (SaaS) Shareable bookshelves that automatically store links
• Notes and highlights
• Multiple options for searching and navigating
• Automatic citations when text is printed or copied and pasted into Word or any text applications. Citations include an automatic URL hyperlink back to the source
• Ability to transform text into a hyperlink to a URL of the end-user’s choice
• Text-to-speech and other keyboard shortcuts to assist end-users with special accessibility needs

Platform Overview

• Available in multiple languages including English, Arabic, Chinese (simplified), French, Japanese, Portuguese, Spanish, German, Swedish, and Turkish, with additional languages in the works
• Compatibility with a range of discoverability and technology services including the ProQuest platform, SerialsSolutions Summon™, Ex Libris SFX, Doody’s Core Titles, Eduserv OpenAthens, Shibboleth®, Blackboard, RefWorks, EndNote, Moodle, and moreFree on-demand MARC records
• COUNTER-compliant usage statics

Request a soft copy of the ebrary Pocket Guide for Academic Libraries and the Pocket Guide for Public Libraries, contact Marketing today! 

And of course, order your library's ebrary titles through your trusted library supplier, James Bennett.  We aim to provide you with the best from the digital world with our renowned - and superior - local service.

A formal media release will follow in due course.

Library & Information Week

Congratulations to all librarians - this is your week!  

We so love the tagline this year: "We Find Stuff".  It says it all really.  We read somewhere it was considered controversial, which was a little surprising.  Isn't that what you do?!!  You find stuff, you catalogue stuff, you look up stuff, you research stuff, you know stuff!  What an amazing thing you do.

We were reminded of the important role librarians play when we came across a wonderful website recently that had gift ideas for librarians.  No doubt many of our customers will have already discovered it (afterall, you "find stuff"!) but the reason we mention it here is the fun t-shirt and other promotional items they had listed that said "Librarian: the original search engine".  The word itself was often made to look like the Google logo.  Clever.  But true wouldn't you say?!

We also liked "be nice to your librarian, it could mean the difference between a right and wrong answer" and we couldn't help chuckling at "Librarian by Day, Deadly Ninja by Night".  Needless to say, a wide range of materials were on offer and there's many more sayings we could share with you, but we digress.

It's Library & Information Week.  And as Australia's largest and leading library supplier to public, academic, specialist, government and reference libraries, we're celebrating with you.  Afterall, as your support network, don't we help you "find stuff" or at least source the raw materials on your behalf?  We work with thousands of suppliers locally and internationally and sometimes we know what it's like to be finding a needle in a haystack.  But we do it.  You expect it of us.  And together we can put the workflows and systems in place that help you "find stuff" for your patrons every day.

Library and information services are important to us.  And we are here to support your efforts.  Tell us about what you're doing.  If you're on Facebook, Twitter or here on Blogger, link your site to us.  And that goes for our publishing partners too.  We're all in this industry together, let's have some fun, share the joy of reading, spread the word about our products and services, and ensure future generations love books, their libraries and the world in which they live. 

WIN LIBRARY SCIENCE BOOKS THIS WEEK!

For those of you reading this blog during Library and Information Week 23 - 29 May 2011 click on our Facebook page, follow us, and comment on our Library & Information Week post by telling us What Library & Information Week means to you.  The winning entry will receive $200 worth of nominated library science books from Facet Publishing, Libraries Unlimited, ALA, Neal Schuman - thanks to our Inbooks business unit, also proudly supporting Library and Information Week.  The winner will be announced the following week and naturally some conditions apply.  Make sure you let us know what library you are from when you comment and keep an eye on those Facebook feeds for news on this and many more promotions from James Bennett.