Michael A. Ireland
Canada Institute for Scientific and Technical Information (CISTI)

Michael Ireland is the Director, CISTI Information Access and Delivery (IAD) Directorate. He has a Masters degree in Library and Information Science from the University of Western Ontario and a Bachelor of Arts (Honours) from Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario. He began his library career at CISTI in 1982, working in a succession of increasingly responsible positions in Acquisitions, Cataloguing and Document Delivery. In 2005, he assumed the role of Director of Information Access and Delivery services

Bronwen Woods
Canada Institute for Scientific and Technical Information (CISTI)

Bronwen Woods is the Head of Monographs Cataloguing at CISTI. She has a Masters degree in Library and Information Science from McGill University and a Bachelor of Arts (Honours) from Carleton University. She began her library career at Statistics Canada in Ottawa in 1988, and then spent the next three years in New Brunswick as Branch Supervisor for the Saint John Regional Library. Before coming to CISTI in 2005, Bronwen spent nine years as a school librarian for the Upper Canada District School Board. At CISTI, she worked as an Information Specialist and as a cataloguer before assuming the role of Head of Monographs Cataloguing in September 2006.

Abstract

CISTI is continually exploring new models in the provision of scholarly information. In 2007, in partnership with MyiLibrary, CISTI introduces a short-term eBook Loan Service not linked to a licensing or purchase plan. This paper explores the development of a scholarly eBook loan service for libraries and endusers and the implementation project for the new service. The new service allows external library clients and end-users of CISTI to search the CISTI Catalogue and borrow eBooks for 30 days using credit card payment. The partner MyiLibrary contributes to the project by providing access to the eBook content of major scholarly publishers as well as the payment server functionality. The project is a success and the new service was announced at ALA Midwinter, Seattle 2007. While still in an early stage of market release the path to developing the service concept and the project activities reveal again the fertility of new ideas emerging in the library community to improve access to scholarly literature in the digital age. With this new model of affordable short-term access to eBook literature, libraries will be able to better serve local and remote users in the electronic environment where no library can hope to hold all scholarly information due to collection funding limits.