On Friday 13th July John Tuck, Helen Guile and I went to Birmingham to attend the Library Systems Programme start-up meeting.  This provided a great opportunity to meet each other, our JISC Programme Manager Ben Showers and representatives from all the other funded projects in this strand, as well as representatives from key individuals carrying out related work in this important and rapidly-changing area of library development.

Over the last few days we have been reflecting on what we want to achieve from our work on E-BASS25 and have arrived at the following desired outcomes:

  • We will have a clear idea of the current e-books and more specifically the patron-driven acquisition (PDA) landscape in the UK
  • We will know what issues consortia face when seeking to procure e-books at present
  • Members of the M25 Consortium and the wider community of academic and research libraries will have much clearer guidance on the challenges relating to the consortial acquisition of e-books using a patron-driven model and on how to embark upon consortial acquisition
  • The Project Team will have worked together to answer and address many of the questions raised by institutions and consortia about acquiring e-books.
  • We will have produced a wide range of supporting materials in the form of reports, briefing papers and toolkits and they will be available to those who need them.

At the end of the project we will conduct an evaluation, written up as a project document.  This will chart our progress against a range of success criteria, including:

  • Delivery of project outputs/deliverables in line with project plan and budget
  • Dissemination of outputs in line with communications plan
  • Contributions to JISC events and related JISC calls, as per project plan
  • Contributions to wider initiatives such as KB+; take up and dissemination by stakeholders of toolkit/guidelines.

As part of the programme of work we will be seeking views from the community as to what other outcomes would be desirable.  However, if you already have further ideas about what you’d like to see from E-BASS25 then please leave a comment or contact me by email.

Dominic Tate – Project Manager