Phase 1 Report: University of California (UC) Palace Project Team on “Investigating a Better UC Ebook Reading Experience”

From a California Digital Library/CDLINFO Post:

The UC Palace Project Team completed their phase 1 investigation of the Palace ebook reading platform in summer 2023 and submitted a report to the Direction and Oversight Committee (DOC) in fall 2023. DOC endorsed the report recommendations at their December 5, 2023 meeting.

The project team was charged in November 2022 to investigate the feasibility, risks, benefits and cost of implementing Palace for the UC Libraries and report their findings to DOC. In doing this work, the team leveraged the experience of the two academic institutions who have implemented Palace, Columbia and NYU.

The team made the following recommendations:

1. We recommend continuing to explore Palace by:
   • – Implementing a prototype version of Palace at a campus to allow for further testing
   • – Doing further usability, accessibility and backend testing and research not only of the Palace user interface, but also of UC ebook content within the Palace environment
   • – Doing Palace demonstrations via Zoom for our campus colleagues to get their feedback on the system.
2. The University of California Libraries should continue its participation in the Palace community process.
3. We recommend more formal accessibility testing and research be conducted across the Palace reading environment.
4. From a usability standpoint, we recommend that further research be done to determine the functionality required for a minimum viable product for academic users.
5. Empower the UC Palace Project Team to proceed with a prototype.

Learn More, Read the Complete CDLINFO Post

Direc to: UC Palace Project Team Phase 1 Report
37 pages; PDF. 

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