Scholars Portal is pleased to announce the public beta release of the new Scholars Portal Books platform, now available at https://booksbeta.scholarsportal.info.
Highlights include:
- Smooth HTML page scrolling with a more consistent display across different types of books
- Use of a fully harmonized metadata standard, BITS, which allows for significantly improved browsing and searching across facets
- In-browser concurrent use monitoring, so that use of Adobe Digital Editions (ADE) is no longer required. Users will still have the option to use ADE if they’d like to keep a book beyond one reading session.
Over 175,000 commercial titles, including all of our university press collections, are now available for reading and downloading, and we are adding new collections weekly. We expect to reach over 280,000 titles by mid-summer. Keep track of loading progress on our Books redevelopment wiki and as always, we welcome comments, questions, and concerns to books@scholarsportal.info.
This platform will become the default books platform in July 2018. All previously linked and bookmarked books will continue to be accessible at the same URL during the transition and long-term, but we encourage staff and end users to use the new platform as much as possible.
Along with loading all remaining collections, Scholars Portal staff will spend the coming months focused on enhancing the administrative interface so that e-resource staff can access their own entitlements, title lists, and usage stats from a single site. We will also be dedicating time to more intensive user testing—staff interested in participating in user testing should send us an email!
The redevelopment was made possible by the OCUL New Initiatives Fund, with support from many OCUL staff members along the way. For more on the redevelopment history and OCUL contributions, visit https://spotdocs.scholarsportal.info/display/sphome/Books+Redevelopment.