News

UK Center To Digitize Conference Proceedings with ebrary

• By Dian Schaffhauser
• 08/19/09

Jodrell Bank Centre for Astrophysics at the University of Manchester in the United Kingdom has signed on for the ebrary service to distribute digitized materials online. The astrophysics center will use the service to distribute academic papers, informational items, posters, and other proceedings from an upcoming 2010 conference.

"We were searching for an affordable way to make our materials freely and easily accessible to the academic community and any other interested parties," said Christopher Wareing, a research fellow at the University of Leeds involved with the 2010 conference hosted by Jodrell Bank Centre. "ebrary fulfills this need and more, with sophisticated tools for users to discover, retrieve, and manage the information."

Other users include Wellesley College in Massachusetts, which has been using the service to make available a number of heavily used texts that are out of print, damaged, or brittle; and DuocUC, an institute of higher education in Chile, that is archiving 500 Spanish-language theses published during 2008 or later.

ebrary's Content Hosting Services allows users to submit their documents in PDF format. The company performs the conversion that integrates the reading matter into the library's digital collections. When a reader performs a copy of material from an ebrary-hosted text, the word processor being used automatically includes a citation with a link back to the source.