EBONI: Progress Reports

4th Quarterly Progress Report: May to July 2001

Between 01 May and 31 July 2001:

Pilot evaluations of three textbooks in Psychology were conducted;

Preparations have begun for further evaluations in other disciplines, and involving students with disabilities;

Evaluations of five ebook hardware devices (a Hewlett-Packard Jornada with Microsoft Reader, Franklin's eBookMan, a PalmPilot with Palm Reader, a Rocket eBook and a SoftBook) by staff in Information Science, Computer Science and the CDLR was begun and will continue over the summer;

Two Masters students in the Department of Information Science began work on dissertations which employ EBONI's ebook evaluation model. Julie Shortreed is evaluating electronic encyclopaedias, and Joan Dunn is evaluating different versions of Cliff McKnight's Hypertext in Context;

Ruth gave a presentation ("Ebooks overview and EBONI project") at Ebooks: what's in them for us, organised by SCURL and SLAMIT, on 7 June. Available in HTML and as a PowerPoint presentation;

Ruth and Monica's submission to ECDL 2001 ("Evaluating electronic textbooks: a methodology") was accepted and will be presented as a full paper;

Submissions have been received for the "Electronic books: old wine in new bottles?" workshop, to be held at the ECDL 2001 conference;

Monica's proposal for a special track on electronic books for teaching and learning at SAC 2002 was accepted. See: http://dei.inf.uc3m.es/ebooksac02/ for details;

An article by Monica, Ruth and Forbes Gibb ("Looking for guidelines for the production of electronic textbooks") was published in Online Information Review 25 (3);

Abstracts for two papers were submitted to Online Information 2001;

Ruth attended the second DNER Programme meeting in London on 18-19 June;

The second biannual progress report was submitted to the DNER.