WVU Libraries encourages faculty members, staff, graduate and postdoctoral students to consider participating in Project LEND, a study on the future of e-books and digital lending within higher education conducted by the University of California Libraries.
If you use e-books or e-book corpora for research purposes, such as text analysis, or as a vital component of teaching and taking university courses, we want to hear from you.
Help us shape the future of e-books for higher education by joining this paid focus group study.
Whether you are reading books in depth, consulting indices, checking citations, making computational use of a body of texts, or simply previewing and searching through texts, we are eager to talk to you. We invite you to share your unique perspectives on your experiences with e-books as well as opportunities for improvement.
You may have accessed e-books for research, instruction, or coursework from any of the following channels: (1) through memberships with public or university libraries on platforms such as OverDrive, Libby, Hoopla, HathiTrust, or JSTOR, (2) through purchasing e-books via Amazon, Apple Books, Barnes & Noble, Google Play Books, Kobo, etc., (3) through a subscription service, such as Audible, Scribd, BookLender, or Bookmate, (4) through websites that provide access to ebooks for free, such as Internet Archive, Project Gutenberg, Project Muse, ManyBooks, or others (whether authorized or not).
To be included in the study, you must meet the following criteria:
Affiliated with a United States-based higher education institution, but not as a library employee,
Have been using e-books, including digital journal articles, via one or more channels mentioned above for teaching or taking courses and/or conducting research regularly,
Able to speak English,
Age 18 or older.
Focus groups will take place on Zoom and last approximately 1.5 hours. You will receive a $75 Amazon eGift card for participating. If you are interested in participating, complete the Qualtrics questionnaire.
For questions, contact Lin Li, lead researcher, at lin.li@uci.edu.