So I woke up at half 6 again and tried to psyche myself up with a big mug of "I love London" mug.
It didn't really help but it got me on the bus. But once I had got there and woken up a bit things picked up.
I started my day by going through a list of all the titles available through the OAPEN scheme. These titles have been offered free through Open Access to see how popular they are compared to a control group. I went through the list and found each title on the publisher's website. I looked to see how well advertised the fact that the book was freely available was and took screen shots to go in a presentation. I also looked the books up on Google Books again to see how obvious it was that the books were free.
I can tell you now it was not obvious on most of the sites that these books were
It didn't really help but it got me on the bus. But once I had got there and woken up a bit things picked up.
I started my day by going through a list of all the titles available through the OAPEN scheme. These titles have been offered free through Open Access to see how popular they are compared to a control group. I went through the list and found each title on the publisher's website. I looked to see how well advertised the fact that the book was freely available was and took screen shots to go in a presentation. I also looked the books up on Google Books again to see how obvious it was that the books were free.
I can tell you now it was not obvious on most of the sites that these books were
free, They tended to just put it in a tiny paragraph at the bottom of the page, if it made it on to the page at all. And it wasn't clear on Google Books either. So that needs work.
In the afternoon I moved on to writing up the results of a workshop Jisc had done recently with publishers and authors. They got each group to write down what parts of the publishing process they were involved in and how long they spent on them. I was in charge of putting all the results into one spreadsheet. It was interesting to see which services different publishers prioritised and how much authors were or weren't involved.
Then to finish the day I helped collate the results of a questionnaire sent out to Scottish librarians about their ebook usage. It covered how many the ebooks cost, how much they spent on them, how popular they are and what services they use to manage them. So ebook usage is going up was the jist of the results but there are still a lot of teething problems and people are still getting used to the idea.
So another good day where I learnt a lot about attitudes towards electronic resources and open access in academia.
In the afternoon I moved on to writing up the results of a workshop Jisc had done recently with publishers and authors. They got each group to write down what parts of the publishing process they were involved in and how long they spent on them. I was in charge of putting all the results into one spreadsheet. It was interesting to see which services different publishers prioritised and how much authors were or weren't involved.
Then to finish the day I helped collate the results of a questionnaire sent out to Scottish librarians about their ebook usage. It covered how many the ebooks cost, how much they spent on them, how popular they are and what services they use to manage them. So ebook usage is going up was the jist of the results but there are still a lot of teething problems and people are still getting used to the idea.
So another good day where I learnt a lot about attitudes towards electronic resources and open access in academia.
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