The central library of National Law University Delhi has rich collection of law e-books from various publishers. These e-books were available to the faculty and students through different publisher platforms and it was difficult to find them subject-wise. Library is currently using LIBSYS-7 automation software. The paper depicts detailed experiment carried out to weave these e-books into library catalogue through LIBSYS-7. The whole technical process is described step by step and searching e-books through OPAC. The e-books can be searched subject-wise along-with print books and their full text can be downloaded through OPAC. This experiment establishes library catalogue as core source of information of all library resources. Users get benefitted to a great extent in finding their desired e-book through library catalogue. Other libraries having rich e-book collection may adopt this practice for the benefit of their end-users.

Keywords:   E-books  library automation  OPAC  law library

The collection development strategy of libraries has changed due to limited physical space in libraries and more techno-friendly users. Now the libraries have been transformed into digital libraries. The format of resources available in libraries is changed from print to digital resources. Academic libraries are facing more challenges as the new generation users are more oriented towards technology and henceforth more demanding to read in electronic formats through smart phones, laptops, tablets, etc. E-books have been emerged as a major form of collection which these users are anticipating from libraries. E-book is electronic copy of a printed book or a computer file that needs a device such as personal computer or personal digital assistant (PDAs) to access and read. Acquisition, licensing contracts, management and access of these e-books is the major challenge for library managers. ”

The phrase ‘electronic book’ is coined by Van Dam during 1960s while working on the concept of hypertext systems. In 1971, Michael Hart started project Gutenberg (http://www.gutenberg.org), which covered works available in public domain including literature, religious books and reference books. Project Gutenberg is the largest project on e-books providing access of almost 46000 free e-books throughout the world. In 1981, the first commercial e-book was launched by Random House .

E-book is defined by Oxford English Dictionary¹ as ‘an electronic version of a printed book which can be read on a computer or special hand-held device.’ Armstrong, Edwards & Lonsdale² defined e-books as ‘any piece of electronic text regardless of size or composition (a digital object) but excluding journal publications, made available electronically (or optically) for any device (handheld or desk-bound) that includes a screen.’

E-books need specific physical device for reading. The definition given in Oxford English Dictionary indicates towards both the e-book and e-book reader. In 1990s there were PDAs that were popular for reading e-books. After that many commercial players came with e-book readers. However the most successful one are Amazon-Kindle, Sony’s-PRS-500, Barnes and Noble-Nook. Apple’s i-Pad is also popular as e-book reader along with its other features. Now most of the smart phones are having feature to read e-books through various applications and these have become most popular. In academic environment, e-books are considered as standard resources in libraries where researchers, faculty and students are expecting it from their libraries to support teaching and learning.

There is a variety of content type that is being published in e-book format like reference books (dictionaries, encyclopaedias, etc.,) text books, literature, old classic books (which are out of print), multimedia books (embedded sound and images). Oxford University Press has a very comprehensive collection of e-books packaged in several bundles like Oxford Reference Online, Oxford Scholarship Online (in subject areas like Law, economics, finance, political science, philosophy, etc.). Similarly, Cambridge University Press has also collection names like text books (in various disciplines), reference books, etc.

Taylor and Francis, Springer, Wiley, Hart, etc., are other leading e-book publishers. Selection and acquisition of e-books in libraries is also a major task on the part of library managers. E-books are available to the libraries directly through publishers or aggregators. E-book aggregators are the companies that are not involved in the work of publishing, but they collocate e-books from various publishers and make it available to libraries through specific hardware and software platforms. Some leading aggregators in e-book market are Ebrary, netLibrary, Safari, Books@Ovid, etc.

There are many benefits to use e-books over printed books. E-books allow readers to create bookmarks, adjust font and size and make annotations for notes. Like other resources in e-format the e-books are available 24/7, multi-user, search and navigation facilities, hyper linking, etc. Previously, e-books were available only in Adobe pdf and open e-book (OEB) formats. Now some other formats are also coming like EPUB and Mobipocket. Presently, PDF, HTML and XML are the most popular and established formats of e-books.

The National Law University Delhi Library is an intellectual foundation in the field of legal education and research for the faculty members and students of the university. The library has a comprehensive collection of legal resources including legal encyclopaedias, national and international case reviews, text books and journals. Academic staff of the library provides expert guidance on legal research and assist researchers and faculty members. Specific sessions are taken for library orientation, citation, and guidance on e-resources. It has print collection of almost 50,000 books and bound volumes of journals.

The Library subscribes more than 250 leading national and international print journals and magazines of legal sphere. The Library has international and national online databases, i.e., Hein Online, JSTOR, INDIASTAT, SCC-Online, West-Law, Kluwer Arbitration Online, Manupatra, etc. Library has also CD-ROM based legal databases like All India Reporter, JESSUP, SCC, etc. The databases coverage includes article search, case law search, subject based compilations legislation search along with e-books, and e-Journals. Electronic collection include subscribing e-journals published by publishers like JSTOR, Taylor and Francis, etc. These databases can be accessed throughout the walls of the University within the IP ranges. However, Remote login Facility (http://nlud.remotexs.in) is also being provided to faculty and students to get access of online collection to outside campus. Apart from online databases and e-journals, the Library subscribes e-books packages of legal domain.

There are some specific publishers for e-books in legal domain. Other major providers are University Publishing Press and NGOs. The JTPSC library has perpetual collection of e-books (collection shown in Table 1).

There are various approaches through which academic libraries are making available the e-books to their users. Some libraries have created consortia of e-books along with other electronic products. Shepherd & Langston³ reported that California State University System acquire e-books through consortial patron driven acquisition system.

The Northwest Academic Libraries in UK has created consortia of 13 libraries covering 12000 priced e-book titles with 3800 free titles. Jianzhong⁴ reported development of hybrid library in Shanghai via netLibrary covering 30,000 e-books in Chinese and 5000 e-books in English. Korean Education Research and Information Service has created a consortium through netLibrary of seventy university libraries to share access to 8000 e-book titles. On the other hand, McLure & Hoseth⁵ opined that Colorado State University Libraries provide access to about 1,62,000 e-books through different vendor platforms. The library has adopted Patron Driven Acquisition Model for purchase of e-books.

Beisler & Kurt⁶ described University of Nevada, Reno Libraries workflow about e-books acquisition and access management. It is concluded that the libraries must be cautious about digital rights management restrictions, platform dependency, access management software etc. Walters⁷ explored the issues in selection and acquisition of e-books. Further, it examines the licensing agreements, terms of use and management as well as access of e-books in academic libraries. Gauld⁸ advised that a publisher/aggregator should be chosen on the basis of content relevancy, functionality and user-friendliness, ownership of content, licensing conditions, technical infrastructure and provision of statistics. Behler⁹ suggested that while planning for collection development for e-books the library must consider some important points like budget, duplication of already available printed titles, content model, purchase model, licensing, access model, technologies users have like PC, PDA or smart phones, etc. Muller¹⁰ explored the laws of Germany, USA and Canada regarding interlibrary lending of e-books. It is found that there is no legal regulation for inter-lending of e-books, as the licensing authorisation are from publisher, author or right holders only. Castell¹¹ discussed various licensing and pricing models offered by publishers and vendors to public libraries in Canada. E-book subscription platforms are also discussed.

Management of e-books in libraries is a major challenge on the part of librarians. There are no clear-cut guidelines in catalogue codes for organising e-books. Another major hindrance on the issue is if there are certain theories of organisation, technology also have some limitations. The most important challenges libraries face in cataloguing e-books is either to create separate records for e-books and their print counterparts, or to have single record of both to facilitate subject-wise search in the main catalogue. Belanger¹² informed that UK higher education libraries have no uniform practice in the use of single or separate records for e-books. The practice is explored in 28 libraries.

Among them, 23 libraries have separate records for e-books and their print counterparts. Only five libraries have maintained integrated records for e-books through their OPACs. Gravett¹³ stated that in 2005, University of Surrey library started importing catalogue records into TALIS library management system. In academic libraries, e-books can be integrated to library management software to ensure more visibility to the collection. It all depends on local policies of libraries depending on their unique situations and user expectations.

The JTPSC Library has automated its in-house system through LIBSYS library management software. The latest version of LIBSYS-7¹⁴ is available for use. It is powerful and user friendly software with the facility of Web-OPAC. LIBSYS-7 has five basic modules—acquisition, cataloguing, circulation, serials and OPAC. The cataloguing system in LIBSYS-7 provides online catalogue for faster access of the library materials. The system has facility to accept data in standard machine readable formats such as CCF, MARC, etc. This makes possible import/export of bibliographic data in standard exchange formats.

LIBSYS-7 has a special feature to integrate multimedia files. These files may be browsed in a multi-window interface with standard windows features. This feature provides the facility of looking at a video clip, an image or to listen to an audio file related to a particular title. LIBSYS-7 supports about 20 types of files such as, bitmap (bmp), tiff (.tif), wave (.wav), midi (.mid), audio-visual interface (.avi), word (.doc), excel (.xls), (.pdf), (.jpeg), (.gif), etc.

As there is lack of significant literature on steps of importing mark records of e-books into library management software particularly LIBSYS, the process has been done only on the basis of practical experiments of library managers of the University. The library has integrated its e-books catalogue into LIBSYS-7 software to enable full-text access of e-books directly through library OPAC. Following steps were taken to integrate e-books into LIBSYS-7 software.

Step 1: Created excel file of bibliographic details of e-books including fields of Acc no., Title, Author, Call No, ISBN, Edition, Publisher, etc., and most importantly URL of that particular e-book.

Step 2: URL cannot be imported directly into LIBSYS-7, therefore removed the URLs from excel file. Converted the Excel file into .csv format (comma separated).

Step 3: In circulation module defined series as e-books and limit as 99999.

Step 4: In cataloguing module defined type of document as e-books and its description.

Step 5: Pasted the .csv file into LIBSYS server in PFIL folder.

Step 6: In cataloguing module added the fields as defined in step 1 and process.

Step 7: As URL cannot be imported directly, therefore added URL of every book separately as shown. Go to the multimedia feature through cataloguing module.

Cataloguing—Maintenance—Multimedia

Put the accession number, add URL of that particular e-book and process. The URL will be added. (Note: URL of each book is to be added separately).

Step 8: For earching e-books, the end user will go to OPAC

(a) Click on Search—Simple Search

(b) Click on ‘Database’ option to change database, select e-books (Fig. 1)

(c) Enter search term, i.e., author, title, subject, etc., in search box.

(d) After entering title, the details of e-book is displayed (Fig. 2)

(e) A window will appear on the screen redirecting e-book URL through LIBSYS.

(f) The e-book will be displayed through its URL via LIBSYS software. Click on ‘table of content and extended information’ (Fig. 3)

(g) The Table of Content is downloaded as per (Fig. 4).

(h) After clicking on start reading now, the full text of the e-book is opened. It has so many features like print, e-mail, copy, highlight, etc.

Studies in other libraries have found that cataloguing of e-books help to discover them and increased their use. Use of e-books was increased by approximately 50 % at the University of Texas. Green¹⁵ stated that adding e-book records and URLs to the catalogue made identifying e-book titles easier for students. It is anticipated that the use of e-books in NLU, Delhi will increase after this practice.

Now many libraries have large e-book collections but their cataloguing practice is still in its nascent phase. The provision of organising e-books in AACR is also not sufficient enough. However, variety of library management softwares with varying features is also a hindrance in cataloguing of e-books uniformly. There is lack of literature on the practical steps. But as readers of e-books have increased, librarians are bound to find out ways for effective management and access of e-books. The Joint Information Systems Committee on promoting e-books for higher education recommended that library OPACs must be searchable by format of reading material to facilitate users to search e-books¹⁶. Present effort is done to integrate e-books with print book catalogue through library automation software to collocate search results, as well as ease in finding the e-books subject-wise. Only e-books can be also searched in the automation software.

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Dr Priya Rai is working as Head, JTPSC Library, National Law University Delhi. She has done BSc, LLB, MPhil and PhD degrees and qualified UGC-NET. She is the recipient of Common wealth Professional Fellowship (2015) with Institute of Advanced Legal Studies, University of London, UK; Visiting Fellowship in Law Librarianship (2015); FCIL Schaffer Grant from American Association of Law Libraries (2012) and Bitner Research Fellowship (2012) from Cornell University Law Library (USA). She has co-edited 9 books and published 21 research papers in refereed journals and conferences. She is Consultant to Royal Supreme Court of Bhutan Library.

Dr Samar Iqbal Bakhshi is working as Assistant Librarian in JTPSC Library, National Law University Delhi. She has obtained BSc, DCA, MLISc, PhD degrees and qualified UGC-JRF. She has published more than 10 research papers in national and international journals and conference proceedings. She has specialisation in e-resources management and access.

Mr Akash Singh is currently working as Assistant Librarian in JTPSC Library, National Law University Delhi. He has obtained LLB, MA, MLISc, MPhil, PhD degrees and qualified UGC-NET. He has edited 9 books and published more than 15 research papers in various journals and conference proceedings. His areas of interest are: Library automation, networking, web-based information resources and open access initiatives.