BiblioBoard® Adds More Than 370 New Book Publishing Partners to Platform; PatronsFirst™ Library Set to Expand to Over 125,000 eBooks
Charleston, South Carolina (PRWEB) January 23, 2014 -- In advance of the 2014 American Library Association (ALA) mid-winter conference, BiblioLabs® announces the signing of over 370 additional publishers to its BiblioBoard platform in the last quarter of 2013. This expands BiblioBoard’s digital content by over 125,000 recently published eBooks in addition to tens of thousands of thematically curated photos, documents, sounds, videos and other ephemera already offered by the award-winning platform.
The platform launched in March of 2013 and immediately won recognition for its intuitive interface and user-friendly design. BiblioBoard provides libraries the opportunity to offer patrons a single, unified media experience on all tablets and the web. This vastly improves upon the current library experiences of patrons, and is like the consumer digital experiences patrons are used to. The new publishers and products being showcased at ALA cross multiple genres and contain offerings for public, academic and K-12 libraries.
“We are working across the entire range of library systems worldwide,” says BiblioLabs founder and chief business officer, Mitchell Davis. “We are exceling across all library segments and working with each in slightly different ways. We are a nimble software company, and our DNA is to create great patron user-experiences across all devices and keep those products ahead of the market. All types of libraries and schools realize they are competing for the attention of patrons and students in a fast-moving mobile world. We solve digital user-experience issues for the library, which frees them to focus on their mission of being a conduit between content and community.”
Davis believes the conventional thinking that pits publishers against libraries is not accurate. “I just came back from Digital Book World, and publishers I talked with agree that mainstream adoption of digital libraries will ultimately be a positive factor in their long-term competitive roadmap. They also understand this will require new and innovative business models. We are discussing some big ideas with big authors and publishers that will turn libraries into digital discovery machines. All of the publishers we work with have licensed content under terms that allow a seamless user-experience. That’s a game-changer,” Davis adds.
BiblioBoard is the most ReadersFirst-friendly product conceived. It is platform agnostic and does away with hold lists and multi-user limits. It also supports any digital media type delivered by the library, including eBooks, images, audio, and video. Libraries can license their own content (Douglass County Model) or buy content that has been pre-licensed for this type of ReadersFirst-friendly patron use.
According to Carolyn Morris, BiblioLabs vice president for digital products, the ability for BiblioBoard to support library-negotiated content is an important distinction to other eBook platforms. “For libraries, it can serve the same role as Adobe Content Server but without transaction charges, maintenance or front-end development. We have created—and are continuing to create—a huge content pool of books that libraries can purchase in a ReadersFirst-friendly manner. We work side-by-side with libraries to get the content they want, the way they want it,” she added.
Some of the new products being announced at the ALA Mid-winter Conference include:
• Graphic Novels, Young Adult and Children’s: This includes thousands of in-demand publisher titles in the highest demand categories for public libraries from publishers like Bluewater Productions, eigoMANGA, Arcana Studio, Barrallier, and many more.
• Academic Content: Robust collections of eBooks and journals from prestigious presses, including UNC Press, University of Manchester Press and Purdue.
• Common Core Teaching Modules for Teachers and Parents:
These include the British Library Common Core Timelines, rich in primary source materials spanning the High Middle Ages to the turn of the 20th century; curated and categorized by theme and time period, each collection features supplemental Teaching Guides with discussion questions, vocabulary terms, writing prompts and more—all aligned with Common Core State Standards.
BiblioBoard Common Core is a new product for schools and grades 6-12. Over 1.5 million pages of high-quality primary source media expertly curated and organized into 12 Common Core Modules, complete with supplemental Teaching Guides aligned with Common Core State Standards. The National Archives of the UK, a collection of primary source materials—manuscripts, WWI soldiers’ letters, service records, trench maps, photographs and more—from The National Archives.
• Spanish Language Modules: These are large modules of contemporary Central and South American Spanish language content from over 300 Spanish language publishers such as EL Cid, Scielo Cuba, Grupo Destiempos, Bubok, Granica, Nobuko, Encuentro, and many more. These expertly curated collections center around topics like Art and Architecture, Personal Development/Self Help, Language, Literature and Fiction, and Technology. They feature over 1,000 books originally published in 2013, including all the books written by Jorge Mario Bergoglio (now known as Pope Francis).
• Ultimate History Project and Ancient History Encyclopedia: New products from two prominent online communities representing thousands of curators and historians around the world.
• BiblioBoard Access: Includes new, diverse products from the National Library of Spain, National Library of Finland, the College of Charleston, Academy of Science of the Czech Republic, among others.
About BiblioBoard
BiblioBoard is the PatronsFirst mobile library. The folks behind BiblioBoard are a powerful team based in Charleston, SC. They aim to transform access to information by providing a world-class user experience that thrills library patrons and is profitable for publishers. BiblioBoard is moving library content delivery into the future in a sustainable way. BiblioLabs is also a proud member of the Charleston Digital Corridor. To learn more, visit http://www.biblioboard.com.
Contact: Carolyn Morris
Vice President Digital Products
603.244.6925
carolyn(at)bibliolabs(dot)com
http://www.biblioboard.com
Mitchell, Biblioboard, http://www.biblioboard.com, +1 (843) 606.0092, [email protected]
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