Dear all,
I recently sent out a very preliminary consultation regarding the possible
development of a university service to an expanded list films offered by the
service iLoaded.
This is a summary of the responses:
In all I had 20 responses from various universities and higher education
colleges, of varying sizes regarding the email I sent out on our mailing lists.
Most are extremely interested in the proposal, but feel that the price is
extremely high, especially if they are smaller institutions. The reasons for this
are as follows:
- At present I'm spending around 10 per cent of the subject materials budget
on DVDs so that's coming in at around £1000 pa.
- As we are a small institution (JISC Band H) it would be of most interest to us
if the costs were in some way banded by size?
- My reservation would be the (understandably) large - one off price and I
have to say that the annual £5000, was my budget for this academic year!
-If the fees and subscription were to cover the more significant titles by these
directors, say 5 titles each, giving a total of 105 titles, the equivalent cost in
purchasing a single copy on dvd @ £12 per title average would be
approximately £1260. Remember, however, that a significant proportion of
these are available freely to Universities by the ERA licence, and multiple
copies can be made. So we are probably not talking about more that £600-700
worth of content, although this is admittedly based on a single copy rather
than the multiple access that would be available via iLoaded. I cannot imagine
therefore paying more than a £900-1000 p.a., and that without having to pay
any sign-on fee.
A number also raised the following issues:
- I have to say though that orders tend to comprise a very wide variety of
titles, frequently stuff that is a little hard to get hold of through usual routes,
often documentaries, theatrical/dance performance recordings or TV series. So
while that list of directors is impressive I wouldn't say that it would fully
encompass my users' needs and I'd expect that I'd struggle to win hearts and
minds among library colleagues that such a spend would be warranted. That
said I'm very eager to see a coordinated approach to providing streamed or
downloadable film content to UK HE, especially if it includes a mechanism for
making niche content available upon request built into it. Storage and access
are perennial problems with our collection so speaking for myself I'd support
any such initiative so long as it results in a service that is *very* responsive
to users' needs.
- Looking at iloaded they offer a downloading service rather than a streamed
service - is this what they are proposing for Universities? (so in effect
students can build up their own film library) Would students have unlimited
access to the rest of the service (including games, and music videos), or just
the directors listed below? The directors listed below aren't all currently
represented by the service (in fact very few of the "classic" directors are
there) - can they guarantees that they will be available?
- Depends a lot on what they mean by these directors being represented - If
they mean one popular film from each it would be a non-starter for us; to be
worthwhile for our Film Studies department they would need an awful lot of
content from which Iloaded would (I suspect) find it hard to recoup
investment. The films taught here change a lot (beyond a handful of staples),
so I'd be surprised if Iloaded could keep up with our needs.
- Would the service be Shibboleth compliant? (i.e. would they be able to sign
on using university student computer login and passwords)?
- Does "all legal issues" include the viewing of 18-rated materials by students
not yet 18 ?
I have now sent this to Liam Earney at JISC Collections to take forward and
have also given him the names of the people who volunteered to be part of
any user group (thanks!)
Best wishes
Lisa
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