Search results

This paper aims to describe the state of the art of the Italian Archivio Licenze Periodici Elettronici (ALPE) project which aims to improve the understanding of the issues raised by licence agreements of electronic resources in the Inter-Library Loan Service and to support librarians in the implementation of the right policies.

ALPE – (E-Journals Licenses Archive) is a national archive of interlibrary loan (ILL) clauses, extracted from standard and negotiated licences, to manage, to publicly share and to check the permitted uses of e-resources for ILL and document delivery.

The ALPE archive facilitates public and free access to a remarkable amount of information and data about ILL conditions granted by the most important commercial and academic publishers, and responds to the practical problems of managing and understanding ILL clauses in e-licences.

The solutions adopted by ALPE effectively solve many of the problems reported in the literature. These should help ILL librarians in dealing with the problems associated with ILL and licensing.

This paper aims to review the literature dealing with e‐books to identify trends.

The review is based on the literature published during January to December 2010. For this purpose, literature on e‐books was searched and retrieved from LISA, LISTA, Emerald, Science Direct and J‐store. E‐books, electronic books, digital books, e‐book reader, were the keywords used for searching the literature in these databases. The literature is analyzed and reviewed under various broad categories. Most of the literature reviewed is in English. Non‐English literature reported in the LISA is also considered.

In spite of the unconcluded debate of print versus electronic, popularity of e‐books is increasing and thereby the e‐book market is growing at a very fast pace. User friendliness, cost, portability are some of the reasons for the increased use of e‐books. Varieties of e‐book readers are produced with different features. Copyright and DRM are the challenging issues. New e‐book pricing models are evolving with their own merits and demerits. Libraries are carrying out e‐book usage studies and are adopting innovative practices to promote e‐books.

The paper is useful for LIS researchers, practitioners, e‐book publishers and aggregators for understanding current trends and for framing prospective policies.

The paper identifies trends based on published literature.