Frequently Asked Questions
This list of FAQs is based on questions that have been asked by publishers to Infogrid Pacific over the last 12 months. If you have a specific question please contact us.
General FAQs
Q. What is a Digital Library?
A digital library is a comprehensive controlled content delivery solution. It can deliver books, documents, research material and more. It is designed for university libraries, academic publishers, education publishers and organizations of all types.
Q. Is there a book/document count limitation?
No. A digital library can contain any number of books and resources from one to tens of thousands.
Q. Is there a user/institution count limitation?
No. There is no user count limit other than the Internet resource used. You can deliver books to any number of institution groups that are controlled by IP access. By default we use AWS (Amazon Web Services) S3 buckets and then have the ability to deliver millions of pages per day very quickly.
One of our larger users has over 100,000 users in five countries accessing 120 books on a semester access basis.
Q. Can I limit which books a user can access?
Yes. You can limit users to specific categories. At present you cannot limit a user to a specific book in a category unless it is the only book. This may change in the future.
A main objective of book categories is to allow multiple books for a course or study speciality.
Q. Can I make different content available to different organizations or institution groups?
Yes. There is an extension Group function that allows you to make certain content available to a specific organization on terms and conditions. A Group contains it's own Categories. These will only be available to that Group.
For example: If an education publisher needs to deliver textbooks to multiple schools in Years (Standards) 1-12, a group can be created for each school and those groups can contain 12 categories containing textbooks and other learning resources for each year. The IP controlled interface access makes sure the right students go straight to the correct books and supplementary learning resources.
Q. How do I add a new category?
There are two things to do. First add the Category icon to the Category Page. Next add a new Category-Books page from templates. Set the links and other information and publish. Your site will be immediately updated. You can add the books into the Category book folder before or after you publish the main site. This requires a user who is comfortable using IGP:Digital Publisher and could be regarded as a "semi-technical" job.
Q. Should I use a Digital Library or eBook formats such as ePub to distribute Education content?
Epub and Kindle are pretty much print-books in digital formats locked in to a reading system. This may be OK in some regions, but there is little value in this even with interactive textbooks. What a digital library solution can do is provide additional learning, teaching and testing resources. This means a publisher can add value to their print or digital textbooks that makes them more useful to teachers and students.
The downside of a digital library used this way is that students need Internet access. That many not be available or affordable in developing countries but is an advantage where schools have open Internet access.
Generally the Digital Library strategy is superior to eBook formats such as ePub and Mobi for both publishers and end-users because of it's ability to build directly on the Open Internet and harvest all of the power of that environment. EPub and Kindle have very limited options for testing, interactivity and rich media delivery.
Are there any book acess statistics?
Yes. The demonstration bookstore works with PiwiK and Chartbeat. These are two standard and powerful website statistical analysis engines. In addition AWS can be set up to record statistics on every user interaction. We have not implement a user tracking statistics engine at this time but if there is sufficient demand we will put it on the development list.
Business & Technical FAQs
Q. What are the benefits of the Infogrid Pacific static page approach?
Low cost of deployment, low cost of ownership and operation, ease of setup, ease of on-going administration and maintenance. The main alternative option is a custom Content Management Server installation. A CMS may be suitable if cost of setup and operation is not a major concern. A CMS may be able to provide more granular user control.
Q What are the components in IGP:Digital Library?
IGP:Digital Library has a number of modules that give the library owner control over the content and user access. The main modules are:
Library importer and processor. If your content is digitized in IGP:Digital Publisher this is not required. If you have suitable HTML pages, ePub books or XML content this module has import processors that can be customized to allow processing of stand XML such as DocBook, TEI and others.
Search engine module. The search engine allows users to search only content to which they have access. There are a number of search features that make this very powerful across large collections of books and other content.
User authentication and control module. This allows you to control who can access the groups and book categories and from where.
Reading Interface and User Tools. The reading interface has comprehensive reading navigation, and user reading customization tools. These can be customized at any time.
Statisitics Reporting. The default system is PiWiK which can be easily implemented for any custom implementation.
Q. Can I add custom features?
Yes. That is the strength of the system. It is built on the standard web. New content engagement tools can be added at any time or the existing features modified.
Q How much does it cost?
In addition to the IGP:Digital Publisher license fee, setting up and customizing the look and feel of a digital library is just a few days work. The other cost is hosting and AWS is very cost effective even for large scale delivery. AWS Pricing (external link).
Q. Does Infogrid Pacific take a share of book revenue?
No. We have a one time license fee and annual software assurance. We provide cost effective support services for customization, production, and administration if required. Infogrid Pacific never takes a revenue cut from publishers. We have done it in the past and it never works out well for either party.
Q How do I get content into the digital library?
The content must be available in a digital form. Ideally the content is produced in IGP:Digital Publisher and published directly to the library as a standard format/package. In this case it only requires the metadata and configuration to be setup, then click the Static Site button on IGP:Formats on Demand. There are also ePub and XML import options. The quality of the final content is dependent on the quality of the digitization of those options.
Ideally existing ePub or XML content can be imported into IGP:Digital Publisher, cleaned up as required, and then control published to your digital library. That is why we provide a courtesy IGP:Digital Publisher Portal with every IGP:Digital Library licence.