• 8 collections including 3 licensed collections, which are CCEL, TREN, and EBSCO.
• Integrated AJAX-driven search, so fields can be instantly updated from within the search page.
• MARC21 support throughout for both presenting information and exporting into existing OPAC systems.
• New librarian backend allowing control over collection visibility, student access permission, usage reporting, page creation, and page settings.
• New smarty-driven templates so each library is independently customizable.
• User login system for improved integrated authentication and book saving features.

It is actually a whole new system, so there are a host of new features unavailable on the previous version. The library interface can be seen at http://library.rdwl.org and a guest username and password can be provided upon request.

This e-Library system can be provided to Christian schools and organizations that wish to offer this service to its members. The free content can be provided without cost, but agreements for licensed collections will need to be formed separately. Please contact us if you would like to work with the RDWLP.

The Ralph D Winter Library Project has just signed up for EBSCO’s Academic Search Premiere journal database. EBSCO will provide MARC records for the 4,758 full-text journals currently in this collection allowing Olivet University students to access hundreds of thousands of academic journal articles. This collection is licensed, so RDWLP partners who wish to sign up for EBSCO access will need separate usage agreements.

We are very happy to offer the definitive academic journal database for our students. Now that we have solidified our offerings in the general-interest departments, we want to turn our focus back toward our original goal: finding more high quality Christian content to make available to our users. With the launch of RDWLP version 2.0 just around the corner, we are getting ready to actively promote the software platform we have developed.

The mission of the CCEL, according to a mission statement published in 2006, is simply:

The Christian Classics Ethereal Library (CCEL) seeks to build up the church by making classic Christian literature widely available and promoting its use for edification and study by interested Christians, seekers and scholars. The CCEL accomplishes this by selecting, collecting, distributing, and promoting valuable literature through the World Wide Web and other media.

We hope that the e-books that have been painstakingly gathered and organized by the CCEL can be a rich source of content for our students and affiliated organizations, while simultaneously helping the CCEL fulfill their mission.

Nick Bogarty, Sr. Business Development Manager at Adobe, announced today via email that the ADE/PRS-505 integration and functionality demonstrated at DigitalBook are now publicly available. The body of his email is provided here:

As many of you already know, last Thursday, July 24th, SONY released a firmware updater to the PRS-505 Reader Digital Book which allows compatibility with Adobe Digital Editions.  SONY posted the firmware updater on their website allowing people who own a PRS-505 to upgrade their device for use with Digital Editions.

Getting The Upgrade

The updater is available here:

http://esupport.sony.com/US/perl/swu-list.pl?mdl=PRS505

You need to upgrade your Sony EBook Library (EBL) first which should then automatically download and run the updater for your PRS-505. This ensures that you have the right drivers for Digital Editions and the Sony Reader to communicate with.  Once you have done this, Digital Editions will automatically recognize the Sony Reader and it will appear as a new bookshelf (or up to 3 if you have smart cards inserted) in your library. (If you don’t have Digital Editions, get it here http://www.adobe.com/products/digitaleditions).

You will need to authorize your Sony Reader in order to use it with protected books that you have bought or borrowed online. Note that this also means that you will need to authorize Digital Editions if you have not already done so. Digital Editions will walk you through these steps with a wizard.  Once you have authorized your Reader, you can drag and drop books back and forth between Digital Editions on your PC and your SONY Reader.

EPUB, PDF reflow and Digital Editions

The upgrade allows for the SONY Reader to read EPUB files and also reflows standard PDF eBooks for better readability on the device.

If you are a publisher and are creating EPUB files for distribution, it is very important that you follow an EPUB Best Practices Guide to ensure that your EPUB files work correctly on the SONY Reader and future supported mobile devices with Digital Editions.  In particular, the EPUB Best Practices Guide specifically details important file size requirements that publishers must follow for make their EPUB files work with mobile devices.  The EPUB Best Practices Guide can be download (as an EPUB file) for free at http://www.adobe.com/devnet/digitalpublishing/epubs/EPUBBestPractices-1_0_2.epub.

Protecting EPUB and PDF files to Digital Editions, SONY Reader and Future Supported Devices

PDF files which are currently protected by publishers, distributors and other operators of Adobe Content Server 3 are able to be transferred to the SONY Reader by Adobe Digital Editions users.  This means that customers of retailers and libraries who currently distribute Adobe PDF eBooks can move those eBooks to authorized SONY Readers with Adobe Digital Editions.  Adobe Content Server 3, however, is a discontinued and unsupported Adobe product.  A detailed timeline on the discontinuation of the supporting Content Server 3 DRM activation services will be released shortly by Adobe.  Also, Adobe Content Server 3 does not support EPUB.

The replacement products to Adobe Content Server 3 are the fully hosted ADEPT service (http://www.adobe.com/products/adept/) which protects PDF and EPUB files to Adobe Digital Editions.  In addition to the ADEPT service, Adobe will soon release a server product which will allow protection of PDF and EPUB content to Digital Editions from an operator’s existing server infrastructure.  Both products offer protection of files to the MAC and PC versions of Digital Editions, the SONY Reader and all future mobile devices supported by Adobe.  Once released, I will update you on the server product.

This is a very exciting development. As our school moves more and more of our digital content online via the RDWLP e-library platform, we can imagine one day requiring all students to have a device such as the PRS-505. As long as significant content is available via the library, we can move toward a learning environment where all learning material is available at the touch of our students’ e-book readers.

The Ralph D Winter Library Project was able to finalize a licensing agreement with the Theological Research Exchange Network, the premiere distributor of over 10,000 Christian theological theses and dissertations published by students from 70 different institutions. The work is academic and Christian in nature, representing the exact sort of high-quality content we are seeking. The sheer number of titles represents a huge boon for our digital library, at once adding thousands of titles to our standing collection.

The RDWLP staff has immediately begun the process of aggregating and organizing the MARC records that accompanies this collection. As soon as the integration process is done, we will send out an announcement to all of our library partners, making the collection available to your schools as well. Please note that this is a licensed collection, meaning that a separate agreement will need to be made between your institution and TREN. However, we will provide the technical and financial framework for this collection so it will be easy to make it available for your students as well.

We expect to debut the TREN collection when we announce the launch of version 2.0 of our library platform, currently expected to be completed by August 18.

Here are some customer comments about the quality of TREN’s collection:

“TREN’s collection of microfiche dissertations and theses have made an outstanding contribution to our library. Our students regularly use TREN, often finding dissertations on subjects not commonly found in books. Economically priced, TREN provides Christian colleges an affordable way to add a significant number of quality titles to their collection every year. I highly recommend TREN to all theological libraries.”

Mr. Gerald Franz, Library Director
Practical Bible College, Bible School Park, NY

“Increasingly, theological education and religious studies are in the debt of TREN. TREN’s document retention and indexing programs are a decided asset to librarians and scholars alike and we should be grateful to have access to the services of a firm so closely aligned with our interests.”

Dr. Stephen Peterson, Former Library Director
Yale Divinity School, New Haven, CT

“TREN fills a significant gap in theological research by making available the growing volume of theses, written at the Masters and D.Min levels. Further, by disseminating these materials in low cost microfiche, it has made large collections affordable to the smallest of libraries. The TREN index alone is a valuable contribution to theological bibliography and belongs in the reference collection of every theological library.”

John Muether, Library Director
Reformed Theological Seminary, Orlando, FL

• MARC records will be used for our ebooks, audio books, and periodical artices.
• Revised librarian backend will allow librarians to have better control over collections and content.
• Library backend will allow MARC record publishing for integration with existing OPAC.
• Revised administrative backend will improve speed at which our publishing arm can publish ebooks.
• New search interface will allow MARC-based searching, similar to other e-Libraries.
• Search results page will be coded with AJAX, allowing dynamic and user-friendly access to content.
• Various new collections will be available when Version 2 is launched.
• Increased server capacity will allow many more audio books as well as digitized content.
• Improved UI for the frontend, allowing faster page loads and a lighter feel.

That is the gist of the development that is currently underway. We are aiming to have version 2 publicly available by August 18. If you would like to apply for a RDWLP library in the meantime, please contact us. Any additional suggestions for features are also appreciated!

In presenting the e-Library, we demonstrated how Christian schools and organizations around the world can benefit from the development of a solid content storage and delivery platform and system, like what our team at Olivet is currently building. Regardless of a Christian worker’s geographic or financial situation, he or she can access the resources we are collecting. The system was well received, and Dr. Winter’s staff offered to make available the numerous writings of Dr. Winter for use in our collection. We will be proud to have as the foundation of the Ralph D Winter Library Project the writings of Dr. Winter himself.

We will be working on digitizing these writings, as well as other content that may become available, in the coming weeks.

Michigan State University maintains a number of special book collections on campus. Some of these collections have been painstakingly digitized and made available over the internet. These books, some of them hundreds of years old, may not have reached another dozen readers in their current forms, but digitally have the ability to reach millions.

I was able to get in touch with one of the MSU special collection directors who gave us permission to make their special collection, “Shaping the Values of Youth - Sunday School Books in 19th Century America” available via our platform. Many thanks to the team at MSU for helping get these books, significant for the influence they had in raising a generation of Christian leaders in America, into the hands of Christians today.

Special thanks to Annmarie Tate at the Virginia Baptist College for helping us get in touch with MSU. We will be working on uploading this new collection, and will aim to have it online within 3 weeks time, contingent on the success of a platform refresh we are planning.

I had the privilege of attending the IDPF Digital Book convention this year in Manhattan and the enthusiasm and momentum behind this format is palpable. Players like Adobe, Sony, and Overdrive stepped up and explained how their future products and services will more strongly incorporate the ePUB format. I even ran into a representative from Microsoft. After a bit of chatting, I found out that Microsoft was one of the initial sponsors of ePUB. They left the consortium after the format was established, but they thought it was time to revisit the format. I said that ePUB is much larger than it had been, and that they would be wise to take a second look at the format.

We have a digital publishing department that helps us organize the various types of content that we offer to our patrons. They handle a lot of files in PDF, MP3, FLV format, but they also deal with a lot of raw text. Our digital publishing department republishes text files in ePUB format, allowing a good number of our books to be read on Adobe Digital Editions, which has all the flexibility and reflowability that a proper xml-based reader should have.

I do want to give a shout-out to Teleread and the work they are doing to champion ePUB as an industry format. Teleread is probably writing more on the topic of digital publishing and the ePUB format than any other group out there. Their well-reasoned support for the ePUB format is one of the reasons we decided to use ePUB as our main container format.
Finally, I do realize that the ePUB logo in this post is an unofficial one, as introduced by Travis Albert. We do want to comment that it is an attractive logo, and IDPF wouldn’t be losing anything by adopting it.

Olivet University is a Christian institute of higher education, conspicuously located in the heart of downtown San Francisco. Olivet has a strong number of resident students, but the majority of our students are online students. In order to offer our online students access to the same quality of resources as our resident students (as per accreditation requirements) we have always been committed to building and maintain a strong e-Library full of Christian content.

Our first e-Library was built about 4 years ago. It served its purpose well, but after 4 years, the administrative staff at OU decided it was time for an upgrade. Since the beginning of this year, a dedicated development team was established with the job of renovating the e-Library, making it into a world-class digital library. Our team consists of a director, administrator, programmer, as well as a handful of students who help with content.

My name is Mark Li, I am the director for the Ralph D Winter Library Project. This project aims to build a common content-sharing platform that can be distributed to Christian schools and organizations, with content coming from various Christian content owners. We are now announcing the launch of version 1.0 of the RDWLP platform (visible here). The technical details of our library will be announced in our next blog post. If you are a representative of a Christian library or content holder and would like to work with us, please contact us. I look forward to sharing the work that God does through this project.