 I think it's about time to get started, so let me welcome you to this breakout of our spring 2020 virtual C&I member meeting. We have three speakers today, Rob Cardolano, Michelle Kimpton, and James English. Their affiliations are noted on the the slide here. The topic is academic e-book experiences and the use of the simply e-book reader in academic e-book settings, and this is one of these topics that has taken on increasing importance in light of the current current situation as we are being forced to move extremely aggressively towards e-books and away from physical books. So I'm delighted that we can have we can have this material to think about today. So I understand that Michelle you're going to start, so I'll hand it off to you. I'll just say that we will take questions at the end after all three speakers have spoken. There is a Q&A tool down at the bottom of your screen, and you can use that to queue up questions at any point during the presentation, and then we'll just get to them all at the end. Diane Goldenberg Hart will be moderating questions at the end of this session. So with that, thank you all for joining us and over to you Michelle. Great, thanks so much Cliff, and thanks for hosting this virtual meeting. I'm sure it's been challenging for your team. I hope everybody here has been staying safe and practicing self-care and these really trying and new times for all of us. Next slide, James. Thank you. So over a year ago Rob, myself and James were at a CNI meeting and we actually presented, gave the CNI attendees an introduction to simply a platform, an open-source platform for the seamless delivery of e-books, and at that time it was beginning to gain momentum in the public library space as a national library-led and library-driven e-lending platform. And through conversations with both Rob and James, who were familiar with the project, we saw many parallels to e-book delivery between academic libraries and what public libraries were facing, and we began to think about, would this technology be viable for the academic library community? Could we conceive of a way that all e-books that are delivered to patrons in academic libraries could come through a single source, an app that was run, managed, and controlled by the academic library community? So we began on this journey to think about not only simply for public libraries, but also to start to conceive simply for academic libraries. And today we're going to give you a quick update on where we've been in that journey and some of the new developments that will benefit academic markets and plans to pilot simply in academia. I will start out the discussion, giving a project overview. So what's happened in the last two years? My focus has been mainly on public libraries. So I'll talk about the uptake of simply in the public library space. I will then turn it over to James English, who will give a demonstration with a particular focus on things that academic libraries might care about and new things that have come into fruition over the last two years. And then Rob Cartelana will follow up with some survey results in the academic market and then recent and future plans. Next slide. Next slide, James. Do you hear me right? Is this the correct slide? My internet's a little bit slide in here the last word. Oh, okay. So for those of you that are not familiar with SimplyE, NYPL received a grant in 2013 by IMLS to deliver an open source e-reading platform that any library could adopt and enable them to serve e-content to their patrons through a single app, which is aptly named SimplyE. And this was really in response to a need to have a library controlled and library branded e-reading experience, which ideally would strengthen not weaken the patron relationship. And as Cliff noted, particularly right now, this is really important where many of our physical libraries, I think almost all physical libraries are closed and therefore we can't deliver physical content to our patrons. In a recent other webinar, I was in Kelvin Watson, the CEO of Broward County Library in Florida, said e-books are becoming the hero resource of our time as they were able to increase their delivery of e-books through SimplyE and also shift their physical budgets to digital acquisitions and increase reading materials for their readers. In 2013, when this project was started, NYPL, the founding institution, they began developing the open source platform. By 2017, it was in production at NYPL. Over the last two years, there have been currently now over 200 libraries that have adopted SimplyE. And these are a range of libraries from large urban libraries to library consortia, smaller regional libraries, and many state libraries. There we go. That's the right slide across the country. So there's been over the last two years quite a lot of momentum and much broader adoption throughout the country. Next slide. Some of the key reasons for adoption, the main one, which I've discussed, is that libraries really want to have a platform that they can control, that they are delivering a unified set of e-books to their patrons. So they're not sending their patrons to multiple vendor-based platforms, which are very difficult for patrons to understand sometimes and understand what content they're getting from a platform. So the beauty of libraries in plain simply is that all of the content you want to deliver to your user is all available through a single app. In addition to that, vendors don't always protect your page from privacy. There are sometimes third party agreements that your users need to sign in order to access this content. Through this project, you control what you control your patron privacy and your patron data. So you're not giving that out to third parties and no third party is getting access to it. Okay. Next slide. A year ago, as momentum was increasing in the public library space, we formed the Simply Advisory Council. This is a group that gives input and guidance on the roadmap as well as puts together communication materials, outreach materials, training materials, and documentation to enable the adoption of Simply and to provide materials for libraries in a cohesive and consistent fashion. And that group has been meeting for a year. There are currently, I believe, 12 organizations that are part of the Founding Advisory Council and they meet monthly to discuss all things simply and make decisions as a result of how to move forward together. Next slide. This is a fairly simplified version of the components and makeup library simplified in the app. So on the left hand side, you have ebook repositories. So you might be getting content from several different sources. In the case of academic libraries, you might have university press ebooks that are managed by one vendor. You might have licensed ebooks that are coming from a variety of different vendors. And you also might have access to public domain ebooks that you have in your own library or you have through another third party. Through the middleware, which is the library simplified circulation manager, the data from these ebook repositories come together and are aggregated so that you can make the content available through the Simply eApp for your patron. As the library, you run that circulation manager, which allows you to choose which content you want to display through the app and allows you to organize that content in the fashion that you want your patrons to see it. So you can organize it by genre, by subject, by author, publisher, whatever you think is going to be most relevant for your community. Next slide. Some of the key features that have been developed over the last year, which are more relevant to the academic market that weren't available when we talked with you last, is the PDF viewer. So for academic community, PDF is an important format in order to be able to have for e-reading. And so the app launched with ePubs as the primary format, but PDF is now available as well. We've also recently added audiobooks. So you can listen to audiobooks through the Simply eApp. Of course, you can mix your DRM free and licensed DRM content in the one app. So if you have commercial content and you have public domain content, they all go through the same app. And on like a for-profit or commercial app, this simply is branded with your own library. And with that, I'm going to turn it over to James to do a demonstration. All right. Thank you, Michelle. I'm going to switch my screen share to my phone, which is currently plugged into my computer. If someone on the team can give me a thumbs up if they see the screen. Great. Thank you. So this is the New York Public Library catalog. And in that catalog, as you can see, I can look through the different books that they've curated, either in partnership with the community or in celebration of their anniversaries, bestsellers from our favorite New York Times, or their very own staff. Again, the app will also organize it by fiction, nonfiction, audience, and language as needed, depending on what your community needs are. Last time, what is that you didn't see, which is new, is that Michelle mentioned was the addition of audiobooks that can also side by side be played and discovered through the app. What the application also allows you to do is to connect to multiple libraries other than just the one library. So if you are a member of different libraries or say you're a resident of New York City, and you go to a great university like Columbia University, you can go between your New York Public Library catalog and your Columbia University catalog. So here is Columbia University with some books that they've not only acquired, but also that they have digitized and hosted with partners such as the Internet Archive. There's also open access textbooks, as well as some of their own published books from the Columbia University Press. So within these, you can see both textbooks from the open textbook project. You can just simply click on a book, download the book, whether it's in PDF or EPUB that will render in the app. You can do any standard E-book type of feature that you want, like cut and paste text so that you can maybe take a snippet of text or a citation from the book and place it in your favorite note-taking app, whether it be Evernote, or simply just email it to yourself to some other document format. It's really that simple to access the content. You simply just need to borrow the content be logged into your library with your public library card and you can download to your heart's content. Now what's also nice about the app is again with that library card authentication, this is not a commercial app where we're taking liberties with taking personal data in the background. Everything in the app is built to over secure connection and with an eye towards privacy, meaning we don't capture anything that is PII, we simply just anonymously lend out the book according to the library ID that's on that card or that CUNY ID in Columbia's instance. All right, you can do search but mostly it is a browse interface. Again, a very simple app for public libraries, the simplicity of navigation, the simplicity of transactional use helps us overcome issues with digital literacy and as you can expect the generations now coming into our schools have this general expectation of access over mobile, just simple intuitive interfaces. I will, that should complete my demo of the app and I will now go back to the slide presentation and pass it off to the next person. All right, thanks James. In addition to the work that we've been doing to better understand the public libraries, we set out to conduct a survey with libraries to find out what academic library institutions, academic libraries would want. Thanks to a grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, we conducted a feasibility study and collected information from over 150 libraries and this information helped to provide us some information around what are the most frequently used features as we expect copy paste and print is important as well as in document keyword search and table of contents navigation but we also found something that's important for the academics that might be different than public libraries like citation creation and export. Many of the same needs for ebook reading that publics have, academics have as well. For example, ebook viewing and bookmarking and other types of navigation. So this helped us to understand that there are some things that are coming from the public libraries that we can leverage and that there are some features that we have to work on important for academic libraries. You can go to the next slide please James. This survey by the way was funded by Alfred P. Sloan and partners on this consisted of Columbia Lyrosis, NYU, New York Public Library, the digital public library of America, MIT Press and Minotex University of Minnesota. The survey also told us that our users are going to be coming from a wide variety of places in the institution but that the libraries thought a particular area of focus are the novice undergraduates that first year and second year undergraduate student researcher is an area of focus. We think that's important because that really does cross all academic institutions in North America, community colleges, liberal arts colleges, research institutions. And of course now thinking about remote work and remote learning, distance learning may be more important than never but even when we first did the survey last year it was still 68% and of course we expect faculty and graduate students to be users as well. We think that users are more likely to be informed by consumer technologies and so they are going to be influenced by what they use in the consumer marketplace when thinking about a good reading experience. And the final slide and this tells us something that's not surprising that our users are likely to be reading books on a variety of platforms. Yes they will continue to read on their desktops and laptops but we also see equal importance to tablets and smartphones and we see rising prominence for Chromebooks and Netbooks so we'll have to serve the wide variety of devices into writing a consistent reading experience. Finally I'll turn to one last slide before I turn it back over to James. We are really focusing on transitioning to an open ebook ecosystem and fortunately for us we have the IMLS, the Mellon Foundation, the Sloan Foundation and others in the community providing millions of dollars of funding to provide support for a transition to an open ebook ecosystem. These are just some of the examples of activities that have taken place since that original IMLS grant for SimplyE and you can see that some of this work is actually accelerating as we move into this current era. With that James you can talk about where we're going and just unmute yourself there. Thank you Rob. Just as Rob demonstrated in the other slide it really is a community effort and as you can see on our future plans it's really the community that is pitching in to help advance this particular platform and tie it together to the different type of libraries and users across the industry that will be trying to improve ebook access. So what's of particular importance is SAML authentication. So for those of you not too familiar with or unfamiliar with SAML, SAML is basically a protocol that provides access control and authenticates users to web applications. So if you're in an enterprise IT based system like a campus or a community college your authentication is maintained and your identity is maintained by your central IT. SAML is a way to provide that user a single sign-on experience into all the different applications that that university may bring to bear on their scholarship or their student body or for their faculty. And so we're doing this in partnership with Columbia Minotex and Lyrasis. The other thing that we're working on is enhanced local discovery and this is basically being able to provide direct download links into the discovery layers of other applications such as Blacklight or Primo or other type of campus or university type discovery layers as well as a web catalog for those that actually don't have one of those systems maybe in a community college or a local city college. And then lastly, Redium 2 is the next iteration and advancement of the rendering engine for EPUB. It also supports PDF and will also support some fixed layout forms such as graphic novella. We will be we are working with the New York Public Library to help advance the application to be able to use Redium 2 with the different DRM providers that are coming online as well as some of the legacy providers that proliferate the industry. And then as always, content is key. So we'll be an ongoing partnership with Columbia working with the different content providers to make that content available through the Simply eApp. And then lastly, DRM, everyone's favorite topic. There is an open DRM being produced by Redium called Licensed Content Protection and our partners at Amigos Library Network are doing the first proof of concept evaluation of that technology for use in Simply e. So if anything that you heard today was compelling or intrigued you, you can reach out to us via these this variety of channels so you can either participate, just be informed or join in the discussion or better yet join in the development of the Simply eApp for academics. And at that we would like to open it up to questions from the online community. Well that was really interesting. Thank you to the three of you for that presentation. It's been really interesting to watch Simply e come along. I just pasted into the chat box a link to the video of the presentation you gave in 2017. So I think it's really interesting to see what kind of features you're adding and how it's developing. So with that I want to go ahead and open the floor for questions and we already have a couple of questions. So let me pass one of those along to you. The question is, is this an app that could be integrated into my university's existing mobile services app where our library already has a presence or must it be a standalone app? That's a great question. James can answer this a little bit further but this is an open source platform. For the most part it's a standalone app as it's currently being distributed from NYPL but that doesn't preclude an institution from taking the code and adapting it for local need. Our goal for academic use is to ensure that all of the software stack that's associated with the functionality for academic institutions will all be open source. So with that in mind someone could adapt it and incorporate it into something else. Whether that's practical or makes sense I would leave that to the application developer. I'll just comment in the public library space there are public libraries that have apps for their library and they've integrated the Simply e app into that app. So it's like a button in the library app which then launches a Simply e app. So depending on what kind of integration you're looking for I can tell you that's been done. Oh that's great. That is really neat and those apps are really popular in the public libraries. We also had a thank you for the demo that was a very helpful demo and I just want to remind everyone if you have a question there's a Q&A box at the bottom of your zoom screen. If you just want to type your question in there we will get to it or you can share it on chat as well and moving on to our next question. I see the Simply e and internet archive are open to all. What other libraries are open to everyone through the app? It's a good question. So the digital public library of America is open to everyone. We have 6500 free books in there that you can read on the app. The other libraries that are in the app you just need a library card. So if you see your library just sign up for a library card and you will be able to see the books that your library is providing. And for Columbia we're working with Lyrasys and DPLA and Amigos in Minnesota to actually select certain collections that we can load. We're looking at licensed collections from some selected EBA providers. We're also looking at open access collections and our own digitized collections. As was mentioned internet archive is available to all. We're exploring oapen.org the director of open access books and oapen.org and we're planning to load all of those books into Simply e for Columbia. I would imagine once that's been done that feed could be made available for others. And we're in conversations with other major providers of books that could be made more broadly available including Hathi Trust where we think there's a tremendous opportunity for sharing out the Hathi Trust books through Simply e-platform. And they've been very receptive to the conversation but they've been a little busy these days working on the emergency temporary access services, ETIS service that we're all benefiting from. And we hope to restore that conversation with them once their current efforts wind down. Oh that sounds fabulous. If I can expand a little bit on that question what does how would that present to the end user? If you're affiliated with the university but you also have your local library card when you go in and you search Simply e for something you know a subject matter or something like that is is it opaque to you where the resource is coming from once you're logged in with your credentials or do you have to search each individual affiliation? Our goal and I can't speak for other academic institutions very early but our goal is to actually provide discovery through our our search and discovery interface for Columbia which is called Clio our black light based interface. In that space we have 1600 databases, we have licensed content, we have open content, we have public domain content, government content, you name it it's there so there is a certain level of invisibility that we have already it's just that in one in some particular cases those books will also be available via Simply e and you would click a link and the book will show up in Simply e. I see I think the user can look deeper to find out where it comes from and how we licensed it but they shouldn't have a different user experience because we chose a different business model or different parts to get it that part should be hidden away the experience should be consistent no matter where it came from right and Michelle you're dealing with this as well how are you seeing it for for DPLA yeah well and maybe dad answer your question a different way so if I'm in New York and I've recorded New York Public Library and I'm going to Columbia I will need to log into both and then both libraries will be under my accounts and then I'd have to click in each individually to find the resource so they're not merged um and I think because of privacy and authentication and all that but they both become your accounts so you don't have to continue to log back into them but you do have to search each separately I see okay that helps that helps that's really interesting thank you thanks for that for both of those answers and now we have a question from from Clifford Cliff Lynch uh what is asking if you could speak a little bit to mathematics support and also to support of illustrated materials right I'll take that one if folks can hear in my internet connections a little spotty right now we use the radium rendering engine and they are working with the broader community to solve the challenge of math equations and rendering ebooks um they're looking at math xml math math jacks which is a javascript engine that can actually render the true equation so that you can read back the equation as opposed to having a picture in a book of an equation so that's where the technology is going it's not in the app at this moment with the rendering engine but with the implementation of r2 the ability to make those advancements are are going to be coming in the next couple of years and as far as pictures does support pictures uh within the content already if you're talking about anything like annotation or any other type of notation within the pictures like IIIF I don't believe that support is in there at this moment great very helpful thank you we do have uh maybe a minute more for question if anyone else has any other questions they'd like to ask our panelists I'd also like to just let you know that um if you would like to make a comment or engage directly with our panelists feel free to raise your your virtual hand and I can move you into the space where I can unmute your microphone and you can engage directly with them or feel free to type your question into the Q&A or the chat just one second to remind you that this is part of C&I's ongoing spring 2020 virtual meeting we're delighted that you could join us today and we have many more webinars yet to come we hope that you will come back and experience more of our content in the weeks ahead and I'm just trying to get a copy of our of the the URL for the schedule here which I see is not really cooperating here we go I'm just going to paste it into the chat box there so you can take a look at the the webinars that will follow this one all the way through the end of May and I see we have another question now and the question is UVA Hathi Trust Bookshare IA and a few other academic institutions are working on making remediate texts available has there been any discussion about serving that type of content what's remediate texts let's see Robin if you could just expand a little bit on what you have in mind when you refer to remediate texts while she's doing that I'll just mention we're planning to go live with a pilot for Columbia a limited production system in the fall of 2020 if there's any body on the chat that's interested in participating in this expansion or use of simply efor academics we'd love to hear from you you can put it in the chat box we'd love to hear that in terms of accessibility James maybe you want to talk about accessibility thank you for that yes as far as sex accessibility again radium is where we leverage that community and the development that is really focused on making e-pubs more accessible as a format when they're founding members the basic consortium is a development partner with them to make to be able to design the technology so that it can actually present the the underlying text to the rendering engine and the platform so that the any on board assistive technologies like for ios which would be voiceover or for android which would be talk back would be available to those systems so that you could actually read and navigate the book with just using touch and gesture and not have to actually be able to see the content so yes access accessibility is something that we built into the app by design starting back in 2015 in the technology selections for medium wonderful that's terrific thank you for that question robin and we have a comment oh that's from you james math ml support on roadmap for radium did i pronounce that right that's correct i was just uh putting in the uh writing the answer to cliff's question got it okay in case excellent okay well uh with that i would like to thank our panelists once again for coming to c&i and talking to us about simply e thank you so much for your time and i'd also like to thank all of our attendees for taking the time to join us here um we're so glad you could come we hope you'll come back for more webinars through c&i's virtual spring meeting we hope that everyone will be well and that we'll see you again soon take care everyone see you everyone thank you dianna