Scholars Portal is pleased to announce the beta release of the new Scholars Portal Books platform. We invite staff at OCUL schools to try searching, reading, and downloading on the new platform, and to complete the feedback survey here, or send us your thoughts by email to books@scholarsportal.info 

About the redevelopment

The Scholars Portal Books platform was released in 2009, when the ebook landscape looked significantly different. Consultation with the OCUL community indicated significant interest in renewing the platform, both to end reliance on software that is no longer supported, and to better be able to serve up content as it’s packaged and purchased today. In late 2014 the OCUL Directors approved funding for a two year redevelopment project.

The Scholars Portal Books platform has been completely redesigned from the ground up. All indexing and retrieval is now handled using MarkLogic, and our new built-in-house HTML reader delivers a significantly enhanced in-browser reading experience. Books metadata is now being loaded into MarkLogic in the BITS XML format, ending our reliance on MARC records to load content.

A new administrative interface will allow eresource staff to view their entitlements and license terms, and to generate KBART lists, MARC collections, and usage reports on the fly.

Redevelopment Timeline

• November 2014 - OCUL-SP proposal to fund Books Reinvestment approved by OCUL Directors
  
• February 2015 - Books redevelopment survey circulated to OCUL staff. 90 responses received
  
• March 2015 - Books Reinvestment Working Group is formed as a subcommittee of OCUL-SP
  
• November 2015  -  Functional Requirements document developed by working group is approved by OCUL Directors.
  
• January 2016 - SP begins scoping deliverables based on functional requirements
  
• August 2016 - Two full-time eBook developers hired
  
• June 2017 - Beta release of the new Scholars Portal Books platform (limited features and collections)
  
• January 2018 - General release of the new Scholars Portal Books platform

Scope of the beta release (what's available now)

• Users will be able to search across seven active collections and narrow their search by criteria such as publisher, year of publication, and subject. Authenticated users will be able to view both PDF and XML books that their school has purchased in the online reader, and to download books either at the chapter level or by extracting up to 20% of the book as a PDF (where permitted by the license). They will be able to search all PDF content and navigate directly to the pages associated with search results.

• Users will be able to select books from the search results or metadata page and add them to the My Books list, where they can generate a citation or reading list.

Scope of the Winter 2018 release (what we're working on this summer)

• Users will be able to access books with concurrent use restrictions. When looking at a book’s metadata, users will see a selection of related books. They will be able to search across XML book and navigate directly to sections associated with search results.

• ACE Users will be able to review the terms of use and log in with a token. They will be able to search the ACE collection and download any content they are entitled to
  ACE Users will be able to navigate through the entirety of the site using keyboard commands

• e-resource staff will be able to log in and review all collections their school is entitled to. They will be able to generate title lists based on collections or load date, and packages of MARCs or KBART files using the same parameters. They will be able to select collections or date ranges and generate a few usage reports.

• ACE coordinators will be able to log in and generate usage reports for the following, based on tokens: visits to platform, searches performed, items viewed, items downloaded
  
  

The Scholars Portal Books team is: Bartek Kawula, Sadia Khwaja, Ivan Jankovic, Sunil Manikonda, Ravit David, Annie Thomas Selvarajan, Bikram Singh, Jacqueline Whyte Appleby