Other
Presence of e-book in academic and related libraries in Croatia.
Ivana Pažur
orcid.org/0000-0003-3200-0841
Abstract
Although e-books have been present for quite a while, it is only in recent years that they have been in the focus of interest of the academic and related libraries. The expansion of e-books was especially helped by e-readers because they have enabled e-books mobility, which is one of the most important characteristics of the printed book for users. However, this was not reflected in the same way on scientific and professional literature because major online bookstores sell mainly fiction for e-readers. Nevertheless, recently there has been a noticeable growth of scientific and professional e-books in libraries, either as “packages” bought from the publishers, as links to a number of freely available e-books, or in digital repositories of parent institutions. In order to determine to what extent e-books are present in Croatian academic and related libraries (94 libraries altogether) their websites were examined according to three criteria: 1) do they offer links to e-books, 2) are e-books present in the online catalog, and 3) do they offer e-books in the repository of the parent institution. It became evident that only a small number of libraries (26%) offer an almost insignificant number of links to mostly freely available e-books; only a few libraries include e-books in their catalogs (5%), and e-books are found in only a few repositories (4 %) and in a very small number.
From these results it can be concluded that the scientific and professional ebooks are still a rarity in Croatian academic and related libraries.
Keywords
elektroničke knjiga; visokoškolske knjižnice
Hrčak ID:
115108
URI
Publication date:
3.7.2013.
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