Page 149 - AC/E Digital Culture Annual Report

incunabula, newspapers and magazines, maps, music scores, sound files... in open access; and
• The International Children’s Digital Library – ICDL,102 an initiative of the ICDL Foundation designed to put together a digital library for children of all cultures and languages providing access to children’s lit- erature in order to help ensure that all girls and boys can learn about and appreciate the wealth of children’s literature in their own community and in the world. This platform provides access to more than 4,500 digital books in 59 languages, most of them public domain.
Digital lending services in libraries
Digital loans were introduced in Spain’s public libraries by the Ministry of Education, Culture and Sport, which set up eBiblio in 2011.103 This initiative was followed in 2014 by eLiburutegia,104 an independent digital lending service tailored to the public reading network in the Basque Coun- try. We will return to both these services in due course, in the final chapter on good practice.
Many institutions, often schools and academic institutions, also have digital platforms that provide a service to users and constitute tools for reading, research and study that complement the institution’s other resources. Some belong
to publishing groups and others are provided by aggregators and distributors who offer content from several publishers.
In Spain there are three active platforms for digital loans in libraries:105 OdiloTK,106 the current platform of eBiblio; iBiblio, run by Libranda;107 and XeBook belonging to Xercode.108 They have various projects under way. An interesting aspect of these platforms is that they are open-access and allow each library to shape its own collec- tion for digital lending independently of the supplier and distributor of the content.
The library’s users can access the web and view the catalogue of books available for lending from their PC, Mac, e-reader, tablet or smartphone through the apps customised for each library.
To borrow and read a book, all you have to do is register. Those tools allow users to send sugges- tions to their digital library.
As stated earlier, eLiburutegia, the digital lending service of the Basque public reading network, is independent. This project hinges on its readers’ specific tastes and demands by observing their preferences and requests, and its catalogue therefore includes recently published works as well as classics, public-domain works and works by independent authors.
The platform has an extensive catalogue that numbered nearly 14,000 items as of the summer of 2017,109 all available to users of libraries be- longing to the network. These titles are selected periodically by a committee of librarians (this
is one of the main differences with respect to other services).
The major distribution platforms also offer free reading materials
The Amazon catalogue,110 for example, stores more than 64,000 open-access digital books,
as some of the authors wish to disseminate
their works free of charge. Google Books111
offers copyright-free online publications that
can be read online or downloaded thanks to agreements with libraries all over the world, often using copies stored in the Internet Archive. Kobo,112which belongs to the giant Rakuten, also offers free reading materials. Spanish examples of free digital reading materials include distribu- tion platforms such as Bubok,113 Casa del Libro,114 Lektu115 and Todoebook.116
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Readers in the digital age