A Look at Why and How eBooks Became Part of Project MUSE

As many of you already know, the new Project MUSE platform formally launched yesterday. It’s home to more than 500 journals, over 14,000 ebooks from 66 university presses, faceted searching, and more.
On December 22nd,  Dean Smith, Director of Project MUSE , posted some informative background about why and how ebooks became part of the service.
Direct to “Launching the University Press Content Consortium” (via directorsmusings)
Here are Two Brief Passages From the Post:
1.

We developed a request for proposal and sent it to eBook vendors such as eBrary, NetLibrary, and Electronic Book Library (EBL) as possible platform partners.
When we announced our intentions with e-books, a librarian raised her hand and stood up.
“This won’t have any meaning unless these eBooks are integrated on the Project MUSE platform,” said Deborah Slingluff, Associate Director of the Sheridan Libraries at Hopkins. “Do for eBooks what MUSE does for journals.”

2.

We saw the potential of joining forces with UPeC as something that was “by the academic community, for the academic community.”  This concept helped define our intentions. We committed to investing several million dollars to make this happen and to hiring 15 additional staff members at the outset.
We developed the name, the University Press Content Consortia (UPCC) to signal to the market that book and journal content together was only the beginning. In the future, we will transform the platform again to include reference works, datasets, multimedia, annotation, collaboration and commenting features.

Direct to Full Text Post (via directorsmusings)
See Also: Two Video Tutorials for New Project MUSE Platform

Filed under: Companies (Publishers/Vendors), Data Files, Libraries, Publishing