Scholars Portal Books Redevelopment - beta release

  • Posted on: 22 June 2017
  • By: Anika

Scholars Portal is pleased to announce the beta release of the new Scholars Portal Books platform. Users are invited to try searching, reading, and downloading on the new platform, and to provide any feedback via our survey: http://bit.ly/spbooksbeta.

About the platform

Scholars Portal Books hosts and provides access to digital monograph content purchased by OCUL schools. There are approximately 250,000 commercial titles available on the platform, with collections from most major publishers, including APA, Springer, IEEE, and Oxford University Press.  

Not all collections loaded to the current Books platform (books.scholarsportal.info) are included in this beta release.  

About the redevelopment

The redevelopment of the platform is a two-year project funded through the OCUL New Initiatives fund. The platform is backed by a new entitlements module and incorporates Scholars Portal’s long term work around migrating all books records to the BITS metadata standard. The redevelopment follows extensive consultation with the OCUL community, and will both end the reliance on software that is no longer supported, and enable Scholars Portal to better serve up electronic content as it is packaged and purchased today.  

Over the summer, Scholars Portal staff will work to integrate concurrent-use restricted content, the Accessible Content EPortal (ACE) repository and functionality, and an administrative module that will allow local e-resource staff to access title lists and usage reports. More on the two-year OCUL-funded project and the release timeline is available at: https://spotdocs.scholarsportal.info/display/sphome/Books+Redevelopment .

Try out the new Scholars Portal Books platform: http://booksbeta.scholarsportal.info/.  In addition to the survey, questions and comments are welcome at books [at] scholarsportal.info.