2019 Charleston Library Conference

The University of Michigan Press, with support from the Mellon Foundation, asked John Lavender, of Lavender Consulting, to conduct a review of the ACLS Humanities E-book (HEB) following its launch on Michigan’s new Fulcrum platform. ACLS-HEB is an online collection of over 5,400 books of high quality in the humanities from over 100 publishers. It was felt that now the market for E-books had matured, part of the review should be a comparative study of E-book platforms run by publishers, university presses and e-book vendors, 17 platforms were selected. The review studied the key features offered by each platform, how they handled searching, content delivery, displaying results, ability to view and download and other key features, there was no attempt to judge the value of the content. Following this review, Michigan Press felt that it would be beneficial to share the results with the wider community. As well as being of interest to publishers, the review will also be relevant for librarians making purchasing decisions and vendors selling e-book services.

The platforms reviewed were:
JSTOR, EBSCO host eBook academic collection, ProQuest eBook central, De Gruyter online books, Oxford University Press Scholarship Online, Cambridge Core Books Online, Taylor & Francis eBooks, Springer Link, Project MUSE, Bloomsbury Collections, Manchester Hive/Manchester Open Hive, SAGE Knowledge, Brill eBooks, Wiley Online Library, Elsevier Science Direct, Emerald Insight, ACLS - HEB.

In addition to synthesizing the results of this review, our session will explore librarian perspectives on E-book assessment criteria. Attributes such as accessibility compliance, library branding, and DRM will be discussed in relation to library collections and decision-making.