From: Dennis Dillon <dillon_at_mail.utexas.edu>
Texas has received a number of inquiries about our experience with the
web
books available from netLibrary http://www.netlibrary.com/
We have had 400 netLibrary titles available on the web for the last
two
months. They been viewed 1586 times and checked out 305 times.
We have not added the netlibrary titles to our OPAC yet, though the
records
for these titles are in OCLC and we do intend to add them. We have
also
done minimal promotion, having mentioned netlibrary only once in the
middle
of a long e-mail newsletter to faculty three weeks ago. Access to
netLibrary is currently available through the standard list of
databases on
the library web pages http://www.lib.utexas.edu/
Originally we set three check-out periods for the titles: 2 hours, 3
days
and 7 days. Because of higher than expected usage, we have now set
all
titles to a 2 hour check out time.
Based on our experience to date, we have purchased additional titles
and
now have 613 titles available. We have also joined the AMIGOS
netLibrary
consortia effort, and will soon add several thousand additional
titles.
We do not currently know who is using these titles or for what
purposes.
The top 15 books in terms of usage by University of Texas students &
faculty are:
1. Learning the UNIX operating System
2. Access to health Care in America
3. Childhood Sexual Abuse: A Reference Handbook
4. Database Programming with JCBC and Java
5. Euthanasia: A reference Handbook
6. The Academic Library: its context, its purpose, and its operation
7. Running Linux
8. Womens health - missing from U.S. Medicine
9. 360 degree feedback: The powerful New Model for Employee Assessment
&
performance Improvement
10. Learning Perl
11. Computers at Risk: safe computing in the inforamtion age
12. Gendered Spaces
13. Labor & Desire: Women's Revolutionary Fiction in Depression
America
14. Learning the Korn Shell
15. One Hundred Years after tomorrow: Brazilian women's fiction in the
twentieth century.
--Dennis Dillon
Head, Collections and Information Resources
The University of Texas at Austin
Received on Mon Oct 18 1999 - 12:38:45 EDT