Welcome to the April issue of our e-books for FE newsletter. A lot has changed since our last newsletter. Almost all of you will be working remotely, as are all of us here at Jisc, and dealing with unprecedented challenges. There won’t be any changes in how you access the e-books provided to you by Jisc, and the FE team will be here to support you through this difficult time.  All our e-books can be accessed by our members at any time, from any device and from anywhere, ensuring students will still be able to access learning resources. You can read Jisc’s statement about access to content during the pandemic here.

If you are new to using our e-books services or would like to brush up on any aspects of the service, our e-books for FE support site has all the information you need. Jisc also has a COVID-19 support page where we’ll be keeping you up-to-date with any changes and providing you with ongoing support.

Promoting e-resources across college

With college closures across the country, it’s more important than ever before to promote e-resources to teaching staff to ensure students can continue their learning from home. This month we hear from Coventry College who has shown a dramatic increase in usage of e-books for FE this academic year. The college didn’t get a spot in the first quarterly report of 2019-2020 (coming in at number 243) but jumped an incredible 132 places to number 111 in the second quarterly report. Claire Lyness, Senior Learning Resources Adviser from the college, shares some advice on how they have achieved this impressive jump in usage.

This academic year we have been delivering information literacy sessions to our learners incorporating the Jisc e-books with other digital learning resources. The e-books have been extremely popular with our learners, in particular they love the in-built referencing tool which almost always gets a round of applause in the sessions I deliver! I think that demonstrating the e-books to learners has a huge impact. We also managed to get our external access working again (following merger) so that has also contributed to the surge. Learners find being able to access the e-books externally means they can use them and study from home. Looking at the statistics we can easily correlate the usage at night (or even early hours of the morning!) to their study times.

The third quarterly report of this academic year will be published in May. You can view our archive of quarterly reports on the e-books for FE support site. For more brilliant ideas for promoting e-resources, catch up on the Digifest 2020 presentation: The Key to e-Success from Ashford College.

Do you have tips to share about how your college promotes e-resources? Email us at content.feandskills@jisc.ac.uk to feature in next month’s newsletter. 

New promotional material from ProQuest

ProQuest have added new promotional material to support librarians in promoting Ebook Central. The full range can be found on the Ebook Central LibGuide. The materials include a getting started with Ebook Central flyer and a quick start guide that would be helpful to teaching staff who might be using the platform for the first time during college closures.

Webinar clinics

Thank you to everyone who attended our March COVID-19 update clinic in March. To view the recording and all supporting information, please refer to our follow up blog post.

In response to the overwhelming demand for more webinars, we are pleased to share that we will be hosting an additional webinar on Wednesday 8th April at 2pm to support colleagues during the coronavirus crisis. This webinar will focus on some of the common concerns that were raised in the last webinar, and offer some potential solutions. The webinar will also provide a space to share advice and things that have worked well with colleagues across the country, as well as the usual Q&A. If you have anything specific that you would like us to cover in the webinar, please get in touch with us at content.feandskills@jisc.ac.uk.

We don’t need you to register for the clinics. Simply login to the session on the day from 1.45pm using the Adobe Connect room link. For more information, please visit the e-books for FE webinar clinic page on the Jisc training site.

National Book Token Competition

Due to college library closures and Jisc office closures, we will be putting our National Book Token Competition on hold until later in the year when business returns to normal.

Additional 66 titles to support COVID-19.

Hopefully you are all now aware that we have worked with ProQuest and Pearson to make 66 expired titles available to support colleges during closures. The titles will be available until 31st July 2020 and can be found on Ebook Central by searching for the ISBNs.

Thank you to all colleagues who reported an issue with Special Educational Needs: The Basics ISBN: 9780415592239. This issue has now been resolved by ProQuest and is available on Ebook Central.

Top 20 users

Well done to all organisations who reached a spot in the top 20. If you have tips to share on how you promote e-books for FE to teaching practitioners and learners, we would love to feature you and showcase your work. Get in touch if you would like to be featured at  content.feandskills@jisc.ac.uk

Rank	Organisation	User sessions
1	Varndean College	2489
2	The Cheadle and Marple College Network	2127
3	New City College	1775
4	Uxbridge College	1633
5	One Sixth Form College	1539
6	West Nottinghamshire College	1531
7	York College	1530
8	Middlesbrough College	1428
9	Richard Huish College	1329
10	Walsall College	1232
11	South and City College Birmingham	1205
12	DN Colleges Group	1192
13	South Thames Colleges Group	1191
14	Chesterfield College	1171
15	Oaklands College	1154
16	South Eastern Regional College	1138
17	Gower College Swansea	1126
18	College of Richard Collyer	1118
19	Nottingham College	1056
20	Blackpool Sixth Form College	1055

Mergers: If your organisation has recently merged with another, ProQuest may not have the most current merger information and your merger may not be reflected in the usage data. Please check with ProQuest and request that they update your account to reflect the merger. Their e-book support contact address is: ebooksupport@proquest.com

Top 20 titles

We would love to hear your feedback on this month’s newsletter. Leave us a comment below.

Back to top of page