 Good morning everyone. We're going to start today's panel presentation. Thanks everybody for showing up for the first session of the morning. I'm sure there were lots of late nights last night getting caught up with colleagues. I'm really happy to be here today to talk about SimplyE and eBooks and really opening up and maximizing access to our digital eBook collections through the use of a new open source platform and a new exchange that DPLA launched. With me today I have three colleagues who will be on the panel talking about their experience with SimplyE in a variety of ways. I have James English from New York Public Library who is actually the founder owner of Simply at New York Public and he'll be talking about the SimplyE open source platform and what its capabilities are. I have Dave Millman from NYU who will be talking about SimplyE and their academic library, their use case, and the challenges and opportunities they see moving forward. And then last we were talking with Rob Cartolano who is investigating SimplyE in his library as a new technology to really maximize access to eBooks in his academic library as well as completely improve the patron experience using SimplyE. So the point of this presentation is to really give everybody in the room an idea of how we are deploying open eBooks, eBooks and SimplyE in the public library system through a pilot and then look at how that experience may translate to the needs of academic libraries. I feel that there are many similar challenges and similar opportunities but they are nuanced in terms of how eBooks are used in academic libraries versus public libraries and what new requirements might come as a result in order for such a platform and a technology and a solution to work for academic libraries. We hope to leave time for questions. That's always challenging with four panel speakers but that's the goal and you'll have all our emails and extra links that you can talk to us after the presentation or beyond. So with that, many of you are probably familiar with DPLA, DPLA Digital Public Library America was really started to provide open access to all the digital cultural materials held by libraries, museums and archives around the country. We partnered with 2,500 institutions to be able to provide open access to their materials at the DPLA site. But beyond that, we've been really tasked to really provide maximum access to eBooks and this was something that was near and dear to the Sloan Foundation so they've provided us with significant grant funding to really figure out how to change the marketplace and the dynamics of how eBooks is delivered today to public libraries. And why they were so interested in this is that public libraries have a few vendors which control all the trade eBooks and they are delivering those eBooks in proprietary and siloed systems. So libraries aren't able to take their licensed and purchased content and mix that content with open eBook streams that they might get from public domain books, they might get from, you know, other authors that want to provide public access to their books. So for their users, in order to access these different types of content, licensed content, trade books, open content, they need to go to a variety of siloed systems which all also have their own proprietary apps. If you guys have ever been to a public library, you probably know that you'll go to your library catalog and you'll say, hey, I want this digital book and that will shoot you off to a completely different system many times it's Overdrive, which has its own platform and its own app for you to access that book. Then if you want an audio book, it will shoot you off to another system to do that. So it really is a disparate and not pleasant experience for the end user. So we are trying to change that by changing the delivery and the access to those books through an open system. So in order to do this a couple years ago, you really have to work with the current vendors and publishers to start to think about how do we create common standards such that we can get these trade books into open systems as opposed to having all these separate siloed systems. So one of the groups that really helped push that forward was Readers First, and this is a group of nearly 300 libraries that came together, in part with NYPL support and with DPLA as a partner, to really put together a set of principles to improve access to ebooks through standard APIs. And once, because what was happening at the time as the vendors were negotiating individual deals with libraries in terms of who would get access to the API and who wouldn't. And so this kind of leveled the playing field such that all libraries would be able to get access to open APIs that these vendors were using, therefore able to integrate those data streams into different systems, which might be open systems and not the proprietary solutions that were only offered by the vendor. So through the publishing of the open APIs, that really opened up the opportunity to really start to change the landscape. So from there, DPLA this summer with the Support of Sloan Foundation has put together a pilot, which is going forward with six libraries, which I'll show you later, and put together what's called DPLA exchange. So this is really a marketplace where libraries can purchase trade content, but also there are open content streams. So there are public domain books in the exchange. We are curating open content. We are working with several partners that have open textbooks, that have other open kids books. We also have the ability to buy books and put those books in open content for distribution. So really trying to maximize the library's access to not only the trade content, but also the open content in one single platform. And the open content, librarians can just download that content and then put it into their circulation manager alongside the license content. So that's very attractive. So what does that look in a system? You have on the back end content coming from the DPLA exchange. You could have content coming through other vendors via the API, which I've talked about. You can have other open content streams through what's called an OPDS feed. And all of that content then becomes exposed in the circulation manager. So for our purposes, for our pilot, we're using library simplified. We've chosen this because we believe in open source. This is an open source platform, which is being developed by the community and funded by the community of players, IMLS, Mellon. And so what this allows, it really allows libraries to take back control of the delivery of their eBooks. They can mix and match content from a variety of vendors. They can add open content using the library simplified platform. They can then figure out how they want that content curated, meaning what does the patron see? What is the delivery of that content? And then at the end, it gets delivered through a mobile app called Simply. So all that content stream comes together in the circulation manager and then is delivered through one end user app called Simply, which is also part of this open source solution. So that, I feel, is really a game changer for libraries in terms of taking ownership of the eBooks and maximizing access to their patrons through a single solution. So we're currently deploying and piloting this system, the set of solutions. Our pilot libraries are those listed on the slide here, but we have a mix of state libraries, consortiums, small public libraries with some academic libraries actually in this mix through the consortial group. And so they are testing the DPLA exchange. We are, as part of DPLA, we have a curation core, which is a group of librarians that we are working with to curate additional open content to put into the exchange, also talking with academic folks out of academic holdings such as HathiTrust, Internet Archive, MIT Press to potentially curate some of their content and put it in the open stream for access if they would like that exposure. And with that process, we're also creating what's called an OPDS feed so anybody can connect to that feed and then download that content, not download, access that content in their circulation manager. So you don't even have to use the exchange. The OPDS feed will be available for any library to tap into. OK, so with that, I'm going to turn it over to James, who will talk about the Simply platform. Thank you, Michelle. Hello, everyone. My name is James English. I'm not a librarian, but I have a great passion and love for the library. I've been at NYPL for about four years. I started in 2013 coming from Atlanta, Georgia, where I ran a small software company. But I really wanted to move to New York City. And there was something about this project that really spoke to me. So NYPL, at that time, had won a grant from the IMLS, a leadership award, digital leadership award, to improve the user experience getting eBooks. So when I arrived there, we had a couple of months to kind of think about it, look at the grant. We were awarded that in late 2013, after they reopened the government. And we got to work shortly thereafter in 2014 with our first engineering hire in May of 2014. When we took this on, we said, instead of just piloting and exploring solutions, let's just fix the problem. We as libraries, we have access to the same engineering talent and pools of engineers out there that the commercial industry does. So any type of doubt that a library would have about its ability to affect its future with technology is really unfounded. We draw from the same engineering pool. And we did. We actually got some of the best engineers out there, Leonard Richardson, Gwendolyn Quinn, who did the first iterations of the app, both of them leaders in the technology industry and in the open source community. So what is simply e? Well, to fix this problem, we had to do two things. We had to build a mobile app, a reading solution. And we also had to build a number of other things to kind of take care of the mess in the background that was the eBook distribution and supply chain. So it's middleware. Mobile apps, there are web apps. So we have actually some web tools, like a web reader, as well as a web catalog that will aggregate and unify the collections. We also have an open source community because we believe the collective action that libraries, again, can pool their resources to affect the industry, to make the industry shape to its will, as well as solve its own problems if the industry can't bring to bear the technologies they demand and deserve. Many in the academic community already do that. Research libraries have a rich history in open source software, and they pretty much redefine their own destiny and kind of pilot new explorations in technology to further their academic research. So taking a cue from that, we really settled on making this an open source app and then investing our time to make this an open source community. It's also a collection of libraries. We couldn't have done it as NYPL without our partner libraries and without our partners like DPLA and other foundations out there, this would really not be where it is today. And then it's also a labor love. There's the engineers, myself. We really love this concept. We love libraries. So we really dig at it on a daily basis. Y simply E. As Michelle talked about, content vendor equals app. That meant basically libraries were relegated to being a sales acquisition force for different content providers out there. We were giving them our users. We were making our users sign up to their terms of service. This meant that those users, our patrons, had to deal with walled collections, multiple apps, non-interoperable technology. So if they accidentally borrowed a book in one platform and they didn't know that was a different platform than what they like to use, they were kind of out of luck. But the libraries had to kind of deal with the emotional trauma of trying to get them to a new app. Or just tell them that that content is not available for them on their reading app. There is a lack of accessibility. We recognized early in 2013 in our industry scan that libraries are uniquely positioned as the only people that serve this community of need. At the time, Library of Congress, through its national library services and its BARDAP, were the only tools available. Bookshare came on with Benetech. Learning Ally was mostly serving the K through 12 industry. But in terms of libraries, we basically pointed them at our library for the blind and braille books in the BARDAP, tapes, different digital devices. But on the commercial side, where we spent millions of dollars on our collection, that content was not available to them. And so we saw that really as not only a travesty, but an opportunity for our efforts on a principal basis. And then, speaking of principals, lack of privacy. Again, when you lease apps to a consumer from a commercial company, you're basically having your user sign on to those terms and conditions. Regardless of what's in your contract, we know how technology is built is how you actually implement those contractual terms of data security and privacy. And this was something we had to really slog through with some of our vendors, because quite frankly, a lot of it wasn't secure. A lot of the data was open and exposed. We even taught one really, really big ebook provider what transport layer security was, because they frankly didn't know. So it was a good learning point for some of them. We also go to great links to anonymize the data so that if there are things that, like tokens, we go to links to even anonymize those so that our vendors can't connect a user's reading history through any type of transaction, whether it be DRM or just the simple download of a book or a file or browse of a catalog to understand their reading history. And we go to great links to do that in the app. So what it is to do, well, it basically turns this. This was the ebook reading experience for New York Public Library. You came in through one catalog app, and after a number, a number, a number of steps, you eventually got to download another app. And then in that app, you had to go back through the discovery experience again, as well as some log on, transaction, DRM, sign up issues to eventually get to a book, totaled about 17 steps. So we set a goal for ourselves. Three clicks or less to a book. So it literally is, find a book, hit, borrow, or get, and then start reading the book. It's a fully DRM compatible book. We use Adobe DRM. We use it in a unique way. We separated the rendering engine, because again, accessibility was a key feature of us. Principle of ours as well as interoperability. And we felt that standards such as EPUB 2 and EPUB 3 were what we should be investing in as libraries as our content media type. So we can use that DRM, but we separate the rendering technology from that DRM. We also use, again, through open source licensing, we make this technology and our innovations in it available to the community, both commercial and for non-profit. So as if university libraries or public libraries or large consortia or state library systems want to take the technology, brand it, use it as their own, they're free to do so. Or they can join the community and help us extend it, build onto it, and prove it. And the commercial industry can do the same. And some are. We've actually had code contributions from commercial vendors who now see, I want my content in there. Instead of making us do the hard work through the APIs, they actually go into the open source project, write those modules, make them available. So as libraries go to install simply, they can just choose a vendor, add the credentials for it, and now that content vendors materials go straight into the catalog along with all the other material. We couldn't, again, we couldn't do this alone. We had a community to help us for the open source software side. We partnered with the Redium Foundation, who at the time was forming a foundation and really aimed at the commercial industry and we wanted to see the libraries take a part in this. Again, coming from the commercial side, one way to affect standards is get into the standards bodies and shape the industry from the standards set if you can't compel the market through market forces. So we started partnering, we put our weight behind the Redium Foundation to make the rendering engine. We also have partnered with the European Digital Reading Lab who is making another, who is also developing on that rendering engine as well as different DRM technologies making those available as open source to the broader industry. We also use, found a standard out there called OPDS, it was actually noted in the Chief of Offer State Librarians to look at this in 2010. Open Library from the Internet Archive was actually using it for their open library project. And so we put our weight behind that standard because it was open and it was accessible and it really made sense when you thought about it in a larger context of the web and how technology shaped the web. So it's basically an atom feed for your collection. We do the aggregation on the back end with the middleware but we syndicate that feed out through a normalized standardized interface and protocol that any other client application can consume and use and display. So if you're a library and you want a unique client experience, you can just consume that OPDS feed. If you're another commercial app and you make a better app then simply doubt it, but if you do that, then you can use our same OPDS feed. So we have, there's a company, a deco that's a Feedbooks app. They're the largest, they're like the overdrive of Europe. Their app can consume our content just by pointing their app at our feeds and it works just as fine as it does in their app. And then you have the Daisy Consortium which is consortium of technology platform providers for the visually and reading impaired, as well as the W3C which has just recently consumed the International Digital Publishing Forum who is the maintainer of the EPUB 2 and EPUB 3 specification. So what's next? Well, not all of those standards take effect early on so a lot of that work that we did, we just had to brute force it through with API integrations. We had to help vendors troubleshoot their APIs, redefine some of those APIs, debug some of those APIs, but when we went about it, we were able to actually get a lot of this work done and get a lot of integrations under the hat. We have, as you can see, six of these different type of ILS providers. We can take on about eight different models of ILS for integration to make the authentication basically of the app work through your already embedded library systems. And then from the content supply, we continually add new ones every day. This list isn't reflective of all of them. We have a new vendor coming on that just submitted their code. We didn't do the work, they did, to make the application integrate into those content sources as well. And what does that allow us to do as you can see there on the, yes, your left, there's a bunch of libraries in there and I think you'll get a peek at that later on, I predict in the presentation about what this will allow libraries to do in the application being relevant. What's coming next? Audio books and PDF support. Especially for the academic and research community, we know about 90% of your contents in PDF locked away in that fixed layout format, non-accessible format, but look, we gotta do it. So we are gonna do it. Audio books, fast-growing type of media that's become very popular. It's also a good media type for those that have reading difficulties. They can still participate in our cultural zeitgeist and be a member of what the reading community does, even if they're just listening to the book or reading along and listening to the book. We're a growing community. We have a lot of interest out there in every state. We have active deployments in many states across the US. Many are in the processes of putting together their RFPs, securing their funding and their budgets so that they can add this to their library e-book services. We have about 14, 17 systems that are in some process of implementing SimplyE or in the process of going through their development of it or their implementation of it, which constitutes at today, right now in the app, about 350 local public libraries being able to get content through SimplyE. And we hope to grow that mostly through partnerships like DPLA and the different state libraries and consortials that service and aggregate e-book services for libraries. So now I'm gonna pass the mic over to my colleague, David, and talk about where we can potentially participate with the academic library space. Thanks, hi. We came at this in two different ways. We had been working on a project with our university press and a couple of other Minnesota press and Michigan press on a project called Enhanced Networked Monographs. We spoke about that this time here last year. So many of you heard about that. And so I won't go into much detail there. It's basically trying to enhance the experience of research users, faculty, scholars, those kinds of people. And so we used an open source platform called Redium which renders EPUBs in the browser. We're using Hypothesis as the tool for annotation and many of you familiar with that technology. We're working with a small company called InfoLoom that is making a sort of meta back of the book index so you can do semantic navigation across different corpus of books. And we did some user experience research to try to understand better what scholars want and how that's different than what casual readers want. And there's a URL for our project page that you can check out. And I'm sure these slides will be available later. The coincidence there was that simply E is also using the Redium technology. So we started talking with James a couple of years ago about is there an overlap? Is there some way we can leverage each other as technical skills? What could we do with each other? And at that time, New York Public was rolling out the platform for their public library audience and was really super successful at that. It went really well. And but it was a different audience than what we had been thinking about. But New York Public Library is, of course, also an important research library. And so as they started turning their attention to what their research scholars needed, we started spending more time together. And here we are. So we're spending a lot of time together. The other parallel track that we're on is that as a library, we have, of course, our own e-book holding. So our Enhanced Network Monographs Project is kind of an R&D project. It's funded by the Mellon Foundation. And we're looking at a collection of about 100 e-pubs to try out these scholarly tools on it. Meanwhile, NYU Library subscribes to about a million and a half e-books. Most of those we get through e-book central and with the attendant issues that have been mentioned. So I just want to go into that context for a minute, because many of you are familiar if you're supporting your library e-book distribution. These are pretty difficult problems. And so we're working with our collections and technical services staff to try to address these. But they're kind of large issues. So there's a bunch of dependencies that kind of multiply on top of each other. And so they create a really bad experience. And it's so bad that we're doing all this UX research and we're talking to our customers. We're talking to our students. And most of our students are not aware that we have any e-books at all. We have a million and a half of them that we pay for. And they don't even know. They're getting them from Kindles. So one of the reasons is the cataloging is inconsistent. Our discovery services sometimes do inconsistent things about whether they're displaying an e-version when there's a P version available or vice versa. And sometimes that works. Sometimes it doesn't. These are big production systems. And they're difficult ships to turn. We have strange variants in the way. Access controls are enforced. So a lot of these are behind different kinds of paywalls and subscription services. And our faculty tend to want to cut and paste from looking at the book experience and paste that into their learning management system course reference. And that almost never works because those URLs have all kinds of proxy stuff embedded in them or session management things. And it's really difficult to create a seamless service so that faculty get what they want out of that. The license terms vary. Often faculty want to put these books on reserve. And we don't know whether there are enough copies on reserve. The transactions are really slow to find those things out. It's really common for faculty to want to put single chapters on reserve the way they always used to in print. And those kinds of license agreements are really rare. And again, I mentioned cutting and pasting from the learning management systems. It's a really, really common use case that's just not supported well at all. And of course, faculty often have the notion of specific additions in mind. And that's just very hard to address. So our public service and instructional librarians go out talking to faculty less and less frequently because they just kind of get beat up as soon as they do. It's come back, but they're head down. It's terrible. So we're pretty excited about this. And Rob is going to talk about we think we're turning a corner. We might have some critical mass. This is kind of exciting. And maybe a call to action. We're interested in figuring out how to continue our parallel track so that we're adding these technical features for scholars. So things like, is an OPDS feed compatible with the way scholars are searched for known items? Or it's probably an easily solved problem. But thinking about the kind of use that we should be getting from scholars, again, we have a fair bit of investment in annotation and markup capacities. And we want to see how that's possible to be translated into these very little formats. And then again, continuing worry about how to do these integrations with the other services that are offered on campus. So I'll step there, Rob. Thanks. Thanks. Ever since I saw James' presentation about SimplyE, I've been asking this question for Columbia. Can we imagine a better academic e-book experience? So I ask all of you and all of us, can we imagine together a better academic e-book experience? So like NYU, the state of academic e-books at Columbia is pretty poor. But just to give a sense of context, we have 2.8 million online books available via our Clio interface to our patrons. You can search that link to see the exact number right now via our great blacklight interface, a little plug. But in order to put some attention on this locally, I created a small working group. And I decided to focus on just 10 vendors. These 10 vendors represent 318,000 total e-books in our collection. They had 7.2 million uses in 2017. We purchased out of that collection of books 15,500 in the last fiscal year. And we spent $947,000 in the fiscal year ending June 2017. And these are the 10 vendors. Any of those 10 vendors in the room? Let me know. OK, good. Let's talk. But like many of the conversations we've heard from James in the public library, is the academic e-book suffer as well. We have an inconsistent user experience, multiple vendors, interfaces, and technology. The discovery and the metadata we get is very inconsistent as well. So finding these books is hard. The vendors, because they don't have an open solution, have been forced to develop proprietary web interfaces, proprietary mobile applications. Licensed and open content is not available via one interface. It creates confusion for our users because they have to go through multiple mechanisms. And our content is fragmented across multiple formats, EPUB and PDF. And DRM and non-DRM seems to be a sticking issue for libraries, and I don't understand why. Because I think most of the reason why is the concept is really bound up in user experience. So for me, this is like the pre-web all over again. Back in early 1990s, web technology stunk. But what it had going for it was a common data format with HTML, common backend web server, common protocol with HTTP, and a common user interface, the dashboard, called a web browser. You could look at a dashboard, a web browser, from 23 years ago and look at it today and pretty much know how to drive the web. So instead, what we get is things like Adobe Digital Editions placed in front of our users. We don't even authorize it. We have no contractual agreement with Digital Editions. It violates our policies for privacy data, as well as core library values. Vendors are forced to put up a proprietary apps like the Blue Fire Reader, which creates support issues for our people who provide frontline support. And then there are these online web interfaces that have just strange things like icons and graphics that look like something from the 1990s. Non-responsive interfaces don't work on modern tablets or phones. And here's the greatest one that I saw, which is a PDF for all chapters will be downloaded in a zip file. So from one vendor, if you wanna actually read the whole book, you have to download a zip file in 2017, really? So I think we need the same for eBooks that we did for the web. We need to move forward and move beyond this path. So we inside our group are working on an academic eBook vendor, an academic eBook report card. And among these things that we're looking at are these essentials. And these have been echoed by many other groups, readers first and the public libraries and some of the things that James has mentioned. So the idea of a consistent one login, local discoverability that actually connects to our catalog, as James has mentioned, the ability to search, download and read, make this very easy with a great reading experience. And for us, the ability to add some of those scholar tools that Dave mentions for annotation, citation, other capabilities and have that be extensible and fit around the standard, not instead of the standard. I'm passionate about library branding and of course having good reporting and administrative tools, library is the brand for me and there's a link there if you wanna talk about that. But you know, in terms of how do we build a better eBook, in our community, there are many folks who are spending millions of dollars in support of this. We have to thank the work from the Andrew Mellon Foundation who's working with the Monograph Publishing in Digital Age Initiative that is being led out of that organization and some of the effort coming out of the presses are being funded by Mellon. The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation with Universal Access to Knowledge, Funding DPLA and other initiatives. And there's some links there. IMLS has been supporting this national digital platform that we heard yesterday and that's funding the work coming out of New York Public Library for SimplyE but also Minnesota and Minotex that's also funding some of this effort to build this and the library simplify.org initiative. And then of course we can't discount the fact that IPDF and EPUB are now part of W3C and there's an active effort underway in the W3C consortium to build a new approach to publishing and there's a link there and the idea that the browser could in fact be the reader with no additional plug-in and I think this is really important. So the potential of SimplyE and the open standards approach is to move to a common method of access with one login and to not expose the complexities and difficulties of DRM when you need it to the end user but have one interface whether you use open content, licensed content or DRM content or subscription content or purchase content, one interface. Have local discoverability, search download and read a fast page experience with a great reading experience the ability to embed those additional scholar tools and the support for library branding as appropriate and reporting in administration tools. And I put a call out to us as a community we must stop proprietary mobile app proliferation of our content. This is an unsustainable issue for libraries. So I believe we should build a great academic e-book experience and with your permission I'll try to do a live demo. Okay, so I'm sitting here with a stock iPad. I'm going to launch the SimplyE mobile app and what I see right away is a rich collection of books from New York Public Library. Thank you to James and New York Public and I see the SimplyE application so I can scroll down and I can read the apps but what's interesting about this is I can also look at other collections. So on the top left what I can do is touch that little library building and I can see that I have access accessible to us the Brooklyn Public Library, SimplyE collection, NYU libraries, New York Public Library and Columbia University Libraries. So let's take a look at Dave's New York University Libraries. So Dave has a test here with a number of books from the New York University Press and these books are loaded here and we look at this and they just load in and this is wonderful. But maybe what I wanna do is go over and look at another collection. Now I could go right to Columbia University Libraries but I heard yesterday there's a new collection out, right? So this is, let's take a look at manage accounts and when I go to manage accounts I can see that I have a list of all the libraries that I have accessible to us. So this time I'm going to hit the plus button on the top right and I see that I have a list of all libraries that are part of this test system and I notice right at the very bottom open textbooks which according to James has just been made available yesterday. So open textbooks are now available. I can click that and I can now go back to the catalog and select open textbooks. And now the open textbooks load. So now this is a nice user experience for end users to be able to find collections of materials and if we think about the way a patron in New York City might access collections where we have partnerships between New York University and New York Public Library for sharing resources, someone might be able to go back between these collections and go back between New York University, New York Public Library, Columbia Libraries, the open collections from the same app experience. So let me then jump over to Columbia University Libraries and now I can see books that are here in the Columbia Collection. I'd like to thank the Columbia University Press and the MIT Press and also Springer for giving us a few sample books that we could load into this demo. Again, demonstrating that we can get these books from different sources and load them all in. And from this point here, I can maybe take a look at downloading a book. So here's the ultimate demo. I'm hitting download to the sustainable city by Stephen Cummins. And then I can go ahead and read that book. And the book has been downloaded. So it's find, download and read. And here's the book from Columbia University Press available in a beautiful format for our patrons to read. And I think this is a much better experience than some other interfaces that we've offered. Then once I have them, I can look at the books that I have available and I can see the books that I have available that I'm reading at any moment in time. So this is just a taste of what I think the future could be for reading a great academic e-book experience, partnering with our public libraries and our other academic libraries, working with an open standards, working with the communities of practice that are really building systems that support our reading experience. I think we can do a much better job. So thank you. And I think we're opening it up for questions. Thank you.