Last week, we held Kortext’s final webinar of 2021 based on a recent open letter to the Publishers Association.
The letter which called on SCONUL, Jisc and other concerned organisations for substantial and meaningful change to the eBook and eTextbook market formed the basis for the topics of conversation during the event.
With over 160 members of the higher education sector in attendance, including library directors and information specialists, our speakers and guests discussed highly topical issues such as:
The arguments for change
Publisher thinking
How Kortext’s 2022 purchasing models deliver to the needs of university libraries
We also delved into data to consider how analytics can be used to optimise digital content provision and talked about the important role of Student Ambassadors in driving content usage.
Hosted by Kortext’s CEO, James Gray, we were joined by:
Libby Homer – Principal Fellow of the Higher Education Academy. Wearing many hats, Libby is a member of the SCONUL Board and chairs the Content Strategy Group. Libby is also in the UUK/Jisc Content Negotiation Strategy Group and is Chair of Customer Services Group UK.
During her presentation, entitled “The Struggle For ebook Access”, Anglia Ruskin’s Libby Homer touched upon dated and unsustainable purchasing models, how stakeholders can come together to keep momentum going and the calls to action libraries, institutions and aggregators can take to help in the long run.
Libby’s presentation was powerful and certainly packed a punch, heeding strong messages to publishers and aggregators urging them to take action, leading Kortext’s CEO James Gray to say: “We accept the challenge from our end!”.
Following on from Libby, we heard from Alessandra Natale, one of our student ambassadors from University of Exeter, sharing how beneficial having access to online content and eTextbooks has been to her learning.
We were also treated to presentations from Aston University’s Erica Lee and Nicola Dennis, discussing FSTP and how this benefitted them and their students during the pandemic.
You can watch the event highlights here or enjoy the full webinar recording by clicking here to contact us.
