Apologies for cross posting - final call

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Digital Textbooks May 10th UCL London 13.30pm

http://www.ucl.ac.uk/dis/conferences/ebooks

An afternoon seminar at UCL organised by the Department of Information Studies with support from the Publishers Association.

Most academic libraries now have significant collections of e-books delivered through aggregator collections of titles from various publishers or via publisher sites. However, many of these are backlist titles and do not reflect the textbook needs of their students. The past few years have seen a steady growth in the provision of digital text books which fill this gap by providing key readings together with supplementary content such as assessments, and exercises coupled with learning analytics. In parallel some universities have begun to publish in-house textbooks to meet student needs more directly. Ironically, students themselves have consistently been shown to prefer old style print. To try and answer where all this is heading, UCL has organised an afternoon seminar on the theme of digital textbooks – what they are, who is providing them, what services are on offer, what is the potential take-up and costs, and what are the experiences of current users?

The programme will bring together, publishers, librarians, elearning experts, aggregators and users to discuss these themes and present case studies. It will be of value to all of the above communities and anyone in the learning sector as well. Agreed speakers include Mark Majurey, VP Digital of Taylor and Francis, Libby Homer Director of Library Services at Anglia Ruskin, Kevin Watt of Kortext, Tif Dickinson of Plymouth University, Jeni Evans of Vital Source, Alex Withington-Smith of Bibliotech and publishers - UCL Press, Ken Chad of Ken Chad Consulting with support from the Publishers Association and CIBER research.

A programme is  available here.