 First, we would like to thank you for taking your time to listen to our experiences in using the SimplyE app in academic environments. Columbia University and New York University, supported by Lyricists, have begun their journeys with the goal of creating an open reading landscape. So today, you will hear from Robert Cartolano from Columbia University, Nancy Lin from New York University, James English from Lyricists, and of course me, Christine Peterson from Amigos Library Services. Although we will focus on the integration of SimplyE, this is but the first step. As you can see, this will be a practical presentation with Rob and Nancy providing you with details of their two similar but different implementations at Columbia and NYU, and James from Lyricists diving more deeply into the technical details and exposing some of the unforeseen obstacles that arose during this process. But to begin, let me give you a little background. In 2014, the New York Public Library submitted a grant proposal to IMLS that dealt with eBooks. The frustration that patrons were having in dealing with multiple eBook vendors and their interfaces was palpable to anyone who worked the front desk of a public library. The goals of this project were threefold, to make access to digital content more simple for patrons, to also create an eBook platform that was not only commercial-grade but open in both standards and protocols, and thirdly, that brought together into a single interface eBooks from at least the three primary public library vendors at the time. So why SimplyE? What were the problems that NYPL and every other public library were facing? Each vendor had their own interface as well as search and browse mechanisms, and logins of course were different across platforms. Requiring patrons become comfortable with multiple platforms is difficult at best, but it also required the library staff to be able to support each one. Accessibility was not a significant concern for most of these services, and patron privacy was almost non-existent for some. Instead of promoting the relationship between the patron and the library, branding was vendor-based. There was incredible dissatisfaction with Adobe's DRM. Both by library staff and patrons. Installing a reader, getting the ID, going through the steps in just the right order, it was so much easier to just purchase the eBook, which was exactly what the publishers wanted. The friction in this process was intentional because publishers wanted people to purchase their eBooks, not share them from a library. One of the results of this is that libraries, some of them large libraries, chose to support a single eBook vendor forgoing the diversity of titles provided through multiple vendors, because it made it easier for their patrons and for their staff. Currently, there are about 345 public libraries using SimplyE across the country. This is incredible uptake since 2017. There are three major hosting providers, all library nonprofits, Califa, Minotex, Lyrisis, and Amigos Library Services. There are a few libraries hosting themselves, and I want to give a shout out to one, the Georgia State Library, otherwise known as the Georgia Public Library Service. They are in the beginning stages with just a handful of libraries, but when you look at this map in another six months, I expect we will see many more Georgia libraries. The big news for this audience, however, is the addition of academic libraries. We have Columbia and NYU who went live within the last couple of weeks, and at Amigos we have a third, Concordia, who will be going live this spring. So a little bit about Amigos Library Services, if you're not familiar with us. We are another nonprofit library consortium similar to Califa, Minotex, and Lyrisis. We have over 500 members, about half of those are academic libraries, about a quarter public. We do a lot of different things, and SimplyE is just the most recent service for us. We pride ourselves on having a staff that is primarily made up of librarians. We've been there, we've done it, we understand what you're going through. We became involved with SimplyE in 2017 when James English, who you will hear from later, demonstrated it for me at ALA Midwinter. We spent the first couple of years creating the infrastructure for ourselves and piloting the service with libraries. In the fall of 2019, SimplyE became a true Amigos service available to any library, member or non-member. We currently host over 130 libraries with another 20 in the queue. Many of these are due to a project with the Texas State Library and Archives Commission called E-Read Texas. For any accredited public library in the state serving a population of 100,000 or less, the state library will pay for a SimplyE instance, and in addition provides a statewide e-book and audiobook collection, which they continue to develop. About two-thirds of this collection is available to any library in the state, including academic libraries, and that brings us to our first academic library, Concordia University, Texas. They will be offering this collection to their students soon, and then I expect interest from other academic libraries. A quick tangent, this Texas project was very well timed. You can see here statistics from one of our mid-sized public libraries identifying the number of events for specific time periods. The top graph shows the incredible increase in the use of e-books during the pandemic in April and May of 2020. This is wonderful news by itself, but the bottom graph is more important. We are still looking at the number of events, but over a longer period of time. The usage went up during the pandemic, but had not yet decreased. Timing was everything for Texas public libraries. Last year, we had a group of people talk to you about SimplyE at CNI. They gave you an introduction to the app, which at that time had about 200 libraries in it, discussed the beginnings of governance, the results of a feasibility study focused on academic patron usage, and plans for 2021. So what has happened since? Public library adoption has been remarkable, with a 170% increase from last year. We have two academic libraries that are live soon to be three in the spring. These and other academic libraries stand on the shoulders of the work done by public libraries in the app, and in its turn, they will extend functionality, much of which will support public libraries. As both move forward with their specific agendas, their work will cross and support each other. We are solving issues for each other. There has been and continues to be impressive synergy. One thing you will find out, however, as you listen to Rob, as you listen to Nancy, and as you listen to James, this is not a perfect app. But it is moving forward, and it can be the basis of an open reading landscape. And I think you'll be excited as you hear both Rob and Nancy describe to you their visions of the open reading landscape. And with that, I'm going to turn it over to Rob. Thanks, Christine. At Columbia, our goal is to transform the academic e-book reading experience. We are adopting open e-book technologies, and leveraging the tremendous work that's come out of public libraries that Christine mentioned earlier, from places like New York Public Library and many others. We are partnering with Lirisys for software development and hosting services, and we are branding our service Columbia University Libraries. The library is the brand. Our plan is to deploy Simply E for Columbia in three phases over three years. Starting this academic year, we've launched Simply E for Columbia with support for up to 50,000 e-books and up to 500 users. In fall 2021, we moved to phase two, the great e-book expansion, with up to 250,000 e-books and support for up to 5,000 users. And then in fall of 2022, phase three, we will move to 1 million e-books and support for up to 50,000 users. We've launched Simply E for Columbia in February of 2021 with SAML Shibboleth Campus Authentication developed in close partnership with Lirisys and the University of Minnesota, Minotex. Lirisys is also hosting our circulation manager, the service software for Simply E for Columbia. And all of this is integrated and connected back to our blacklight based Clio Unified Discovery. At launch, we have 23,000 licensed and open access e-books. Our licensed e-books include University Press e-books from Johns Hopkins University Press and others, and Casolini's Terosa and Longo e-books. We also have open access e-books from OA-PEN.org and unique holdings from our digital collections. At this time, we are supporting non-DRM PDF and non-DRM EPUB e-books. And we've also started a student and faculty survey that is underway at this time. You may learn more about Simply E for Columbia at this link below. Now I'd like to give you a live demonstration of Simply E for Columbia. I'm going to start with Clio, our Unified Discovery interface, and search for a book, Green Alternatives and National Energy Strategy. When I look at the item level record, I see on the right that I may select Read on Simply E, and then at this point, I may borrow the book. Not I've borrowed the book, let's go over to the iPad. So this is a standard iPad with Simply E installed. When I launch it, I can see that I view Columbia University Library's collection. Let's log in to Columbia University. I can go to the Settings tab, and under the Columbia University Libraries, I can log in to Columbia using our standard campus login. Columbia uses Duo Mobile to factor authentication. This will send a push to my phone, and at this point, I've logged into Columbia University, and I see that I've signed in right underneath Columbia University Libraries. Now I see the Columbia University Libraries catalog, but you know, I could also see whether the libraries may be available. I can go to the New York Public Library. I can also go to the Brooklyn Public Library. Many libraries, one app. This is absolutely terrific for our users, but let's go back to Columbia University Libraries and take a look at that book we just checked out. So on the bottom, second from the left, I can select my books, which is my personal bookshelf. Oh, and look at that, Green Alternatives and National Energy Strategy has appeared in my bookshelf. I can select that link and download the book. I can also look at the description, and I can see a full description here, and if I wanted to, I can actually go back and look at the catalog record in Clio right here. That takes me over to Clio, and I can look at that one, and I can jump right back to SimplyE. So I can go from Clio to SimplyE, and Clio to SimplyE, and SimplyE right back to Clio. Let's read the book. Now, I happened to read this earlier, so I'm going to jump to my earlier chapter that I was reading, chapter four. And now I'm reading the book. It's a standard EPUB book. I can navigate and turn pages. I can jump to change my settings, including larger text. I can also change the font from a serif font to a sans serif font. I'll go back again to serif, change the font smaller one more time. And of course I can go and change my chapter via the table of contents. So that is SimplyE looking at an EPUB. Now I can also look at other books. In this case, I've got an OAPen book. This book is a Springer Nature book that's been released to open access in OAPen. Let's download that book. Okay, now that book is ready to read. So here's a nice OAPen open access book. And I could also go and find something from our digital holdings, our digital collections, Homes in Hawaii. And I'll download that book as well. So from one app, I can look at licensed ebooks, open access ebooks, and ebooks from our digital collections. Now as I showed you earlier, that Homes in Hawaii book was a PDF. And here I see it with three different sizes, an iPhone, a Samsung Galaxy Tablet running Android and the iPad, which is a 9.7 inch iPad. And on the right, you can see the EPUB that Johns Hopkins Press EPUB book, again in the iPhone, the Samsung Tablet and the iPad. So one app, many devices. And we also have the ability to generate reporting. Here we have generated a report using Google's data studio from APIs that come out of the circulation manager. And we think this is absolutely terrific. With that, I'd like to turn it over to Nancy to continue. Thanks, Rob. Hi, I'm Nancy Lin from NYU. NYU has also just launched the SimplyE service. Like Columbia, NYU contracted lyricists to build our SimplyE implementation. Lyricists helped us integrate the SAML campus authentication needed. Our project includes 150,000 eBooks licensed from ProQuest eBooks Central. Books from the pilot have unlimited user licenses, including DRM and DRM free titles. We included only EPUB formatted eBooks. And users can download a book for 14-day loan periods within the SimplyE app. On this main page of NYU's SimplyE collection, we have organized our browse lanes to highlight certain groups of titles. With 150,000 multidisciplinary titles from major academic publishers and small presses, we wanted to offer users easy access to popular and useful material. Our browse lanes highlight the following categories of titles. We have over 200 course books to support our Spring 2021 classes. We've also included our popular or top downloaded titles. And we also wanted to highlight our own NYU Press titles, including new, award winners and specific collections to support various events like Black History Month. We also have thousands of reference books from Oxford, Sage, Elsevier, etc. Under the nonfiction category, we have over 100,000 titles split in multiple sub lanes. We even have quite a few fiction titles. To clarify, NYU did not pay more for access to these eBooks Central titles to be in SimplyE. The EPUB files and digital rights management remain on ProQuest servers. We did need to work with ProQuest and lyricists to develop APIs and metadata and link exchanges using OPDS standards. NYU had several goals with the SimplyE project. First, we wanted to improve our user experience and offer more ways to access our books and mobile devices. We wanted to eliminate unnecessary additional logins to make it easier for users to download and read books. On our eBook Central website here shown in this page, users currently have to log into several different accounts, including platform accounts and Adobe accounts. This requires 13 clicks before you can read a book in an eReader app. In the SimplyE app, as shown by Rob, you log in once with your campus ID and you can access all the books in the collection and easily find, download and read in just three clicks. In addition to improving user experience, NYU is very interested in using and promoting open standards. NYU believes that all players, libraries, consortia, publishers, aggregators, software vendors can create better, more efficient, more innovative reading systems using open standards. So I hope you can see from this presentation that we have proven this to be true. Through using open standards and building upon open source software, NYU and Columbia were able to bring the SimplyE service to users quickly and without huge development costs. Lyrasys and Amigos were able to leverage their experience and technical infrastructure to provide and grow their services. Here are just some of the open standards and software used for our SimplyE project. I would like to emphasize that the use of standards and proven software helped NYU get easy buy-in from central IT, library IT, and our biggest eBook vendor, ProQuest eBook Central. If we even tried to build a bespoke eReader, we would have certainly hit challenges with costs and buy-in from IT and our other vendors, as well as integration challenges when trying to expand content to other publishers. So speaking of innovation, NYU's goals in this project was also to build upon the infrastructure and experiment with supporting other services like ILL and Reserves. NYU has campuses all around the world, including Abu Dhabi and Shanghai. And now with the global pandemic, we want to be able to more easily and efficiently deliver titles. We're in the midst of developing a new interlibrary loan system called ReShare through our policy consortia. Rather than attaching PDFs through email or course reserves or special download sites, we will begin testing whether this library simplified backend can help us deliver limited access copies of materials more efficiently to specific users. Again, this would be building upon open standards and established infrastructure. I will not need to build another SAML integration and can build upon the newly developing LCP rights management software that Lyrisis already has in place for other clients. As Christina Rob pointed out earlier, simply is not perfect. However, the whole system is built upon standards and the chance to iterate and improve. It's not just the software app itself, but the whole backend system that is built upon extensibility and collaborative opportunities. Who knows, maybe another app or a desktop reader will come out in the coming years. This open infrastructure can allow us to easily plug into that if we want to in the future. With almost three million eBooks and the pandemic forcing remote learning, eBooks are the lifeblood of our services now. NYU does not want each publisher or aggregator or open source collection to build infrastructure that's not open. We've seen what happens when Adobe dominates the DRM piece. We've seen what happens when the public library world has closed apps from overdrive and other vendors. We cannot let the lifeblood of our services be trapped. We want legitimate ways to share materials, respect copyright when needed, and open access when available. We believe we can grow services even faster if we can support open standards. Thank you. Thank you, Nancy. Hello, everyone. My name is James English and I'm a product strategist at Lyrisis. Lyrisis is a member driven nonprofit who provides services to public and academic libraries looking to use simply to improve access to eBooks. Like Amigos, we implement and host a simply platform across the country for libraries and states seeking to improve access to digital materials. I'm excited today to share with you our role in bringing this platform and solution to academic libraries for the first time with Columbia and NYU. Up front, Columbia and NYU represent two distinct implementation approaches. My intent today is to share with you our roles and goals as an implementation and integration provider, compare and contrast the two implementations, describe efforts to integrate SAML authentication, describe how they link to their discovery layers, share the different ways they use to present the collection to their users to aid in discovery and exploration. And lastly, I'll close with what we learned our next steps in the project and share with you our vision for the platform and its potential future. Our goals learned by doing last mile is sometimes a paved road and sometimes there's a little trail breaking involved. Our role in the project was to implement and host the technology so that we can understand and establish workflows for metadata and content integration. We also needed to enhance the platform by developing needed authentication support, develop any needed content interfaces. We also had the responsibility of supporting and maintaining the implementations for Columbia and NYU so that we could help gather feedback for the platform roadmap. The platform consists of middleware that others have already told you about. We call it the circulation manager. It connects to the different content as well as authentication systems that a library may use. It then presents out that information to the web catalog and the mobile reader apps. The web catalog is a discovery layer, but it's also an integration layer with existing discovery layers such as Blacklight or Alma or other type of iOS systems. And the reader apps, of course, are another discovery layer inside that also can open and read the content on Android and iOS. To connect the content metadata with Columbia, we basically use already existing interfaces to content that were existing in the application. But we had to do a little trail breaking to authenticate SAML into the circulation manager so that we could connect things like CAS, Shibboleth, ADFS, or LDAP or ILS. And then present the content that we've integrated back out to the mobile clients and web clients. Connecting content metadata with NYU was where the trail breaking was involved. For this, we had to do an API integration with ProQuest. But the lucky thing was we could already use the SAML implementation to just fall in on that already traveled path to implement authentication. Let me talk a little more about that authentication. One of the tools we found very useful in getting through this type of integration was the use of an integration diagram. This interaction diagram that we developed here for NYU shows the various systems involved in communicating a SAML authentication and accessing content. With this transaction roadmap before us, we could easily then fall in on different type of standards in the attributes that are communicated with SAML, such as persistent IDs and affiliations. And it also helped us understand how we would want to solve the problem of expiration. This isn't something that's really covered in the specs, but it's something that you need to think about when implementing SAML. Because how do you want to define your expiration, whether that is by a device or by an application or by content access? Then lastly, Federation is your friend. Groups like InCommon help you smooth the metadata exchange between different institutions. Columbia and NYU use different ways of presenting the collection in the platform. So the platform allows you to organize your collection and present it out to the user. Based on whatever type of goals you have or objectives you want the user to achieve. For Columbia, that was to help them explore the digitized collections that were hosted in the Internet Archive as well as access to broader ebook collection. For NYU, they wanted to focus the ebook discovery on certain works like their courseworks or their reference materials, but also highlight things that were the popular downloads or that were things that they thought in their collection that they wanted users to look at. What we learned in Next Steps. What we learned are standards are your friends. Adopt them, use them, and more importantly, document them in your implementation as a university. We also need better tools than Mark for linking discovery systems. APIs and persistent document IDs are the foundation for that. We also need an alternative classification system in the SimplyE platform. The mappings designed for a public library aren't appropriate for academia. The Next Steps. Monitor and measure what we have implemented. We need to collect and analyze user feedback and then work with libraries to explore other pilot capabilities of the platform, like license content protection, control digital lending, using license content protection, new provider integrations, and then utilizing things like the DPLA exchange or the Open Research Library in Fulcrum to bring those collections into their libraries. The Future. Well, we see an open ecosystem for eBooks, one in which we can go beyond just eBooks and start to link to digital repositories using open standards like OAI, PMH, but leverage the open publication distribution, OPDES, protocol for connecting to different eBook providers as well as publishers, as well as some of these open access repositories such as Muse, OAPN, ORL, ORL and Fulcrum. We believe in library-driven technologies. We also believe in open technology standards and applications are a key part of this ecosystem. We believe common interfaces for metadata such as SAML for authentication and authorization to content are important. And then accessible formats such as EPUB 3 for media publication is important as well so that we can ensure everyone has an opportunity to read and learn using eBooks. Well, that's it for me, and I'm going to pass it on to Christine to close up for us. Thank you. You have now heard of the incredible work done by Columbia, NYU, and Lyrisis and a vision for a possible future. I'd like to leave you with just a few ideas to consider. The water is warm. It is time to come on in. This is a great time to become involved in SimplyE. The app itself includes enough functionality for most library patrons as is, but there's so much more we could do with it. Involvement now means providing direction for its future. Also, leveraging open-source software through open standards allows us to do many things. It allows us to interoperate with metadata, authentication and content, the three pillars of eContent, and also makes the integration of other services and libraries a quicker process. NYU was able to be live in just six months. It will also make it easier to sustain the project. Finding developers and other people to work on the project will be much easier. We also want to work with vendors, not against them. If you work for a vendor and you're listening and you're interested, we want to talk to you, please contact one of us. We are also not interested in dominating the market. We don't need to win to influence. We can foster core library values and sustainable access, making changes in other services by modeling it in SimplyE. I hope you see what we do, that the creation of an open-reading landscape is not just a dream, but it is possible. SimplyE is not the destination, it's just a stop along the way. If you have any questions or would like to discuss any of this, please contact any one of us. We'd be happy to challenge.