EBONI: Progress Reports

3rd Quarterly Progress Report: February to April 2001

Between 01 February and 30 April 2001:

The biannual progress report was submitted to the DNER, and received positive feedback;

The Steering Committee met for the first time on 6th February (see minutes). Subsequently, Dennis Nicholson agreed to be Deputy Chair, and the next meeting was arranged for 17th October, 2-4pm, Strathclyde Business School;

Monica and Ruth attended DNER Project Management Training in London on 7 February;

EBONI's draft model for evaluating ebooks was distributed to all SC and PMG members;

1000 colour leaflets for the project were produced;

Ruth and Monica had four meetings with Tony Anderson (Psychology Dept) regarding the selection of texts for the core study.

Several publishers were contacted with regard to providing ebooks for EBONI's evaluations. Taylor and Francis and MetaText (the textbook division of netLibrary) both expressed an interest in providing texts for evaluation, and their titles will be available in May and August/September respectively;

Proposals for papers were submitted to the DRH conference and the ECDL 2001 conference; a press release appeared in D-Lib and an article in Ariadne;

Monica spoke about EBONI at the GIPSECA Consortium workshop at Heriot-Watt University on 26 February and to the Computer Science Department at Strathclyde on 14 March. Ruth spoke about EBONI to the Electronic Book Working Group at Strathclyde on 1 March;

Monica attended the second DNER eBook Working Group meeting in London on 19 March;

Monica and Ruth attended the E-Books 2001 conference in London on 20th March. Project leaflets were distributed;

Three psychology books were selected for the initial batch of evaluations; the texts, and draft tasks for each text, were approved by Jimmy Thomson and Marc Obonsawin, lecturers in the Psychology Department at Strathclyde. The books were subsequently copied to the CDLR server and set up with usernames and passwords so that student access during and after the evaluations can be tracked;

Methods of paying students were finalised with the Finance Department;

The methodology was approved by the Departmental Ethics Committee;

Dates were set for the evaluations (2nd, 8th, 9th and 10th May) and advertised to students;

Three MSc students in the Information Science Department expressed interest in conducting EBONI satellite studies as part of their dissertations;

An eBookMan and a PalmPilot were purchased with a view to conducting hardware evaluations over the summer;

Ruth will give a presentation at the Ebooks Seminar organised jointly by SCURL and SLAMIT, on 7th June at Edinburgh University Library;

Monica and Cliff McKnight will host a workshop entitled "Electronic Books: Old Wine in New Bottles?" at the ECDL 2001 conference in Darmstadt, Germany on 8th September.