At the end of 2015, CLA and the British Library (BL) jointly launched the Enhanced Higher Education Scanning Service, or EHESS for short, to replace BL's HESS service. Listening to feedback from Higher Education Institutions (HEIs), the aim for EHESS was to provide the Higher Education (HE) sector with DRM-free scans of a high quality, with both Optical Character Recognition (OCR) and full metadata as standard - all within a guaranteed 48-hour turn-around. We have come a long way since then.
Right from the beginning of this project I have been involved in setting up EHESS customers on our internal system here at CLA and communicating with the BL to get these EHESS accounts set up at their end. This system allows us to exchange the data needed for invoicing later. I enjoy a really good working relationship with my contacts at the BL and although we have never met in person, it feels like we have come to know each other well over the past couple of years. While my colleagues in the CLA Customer Services Team look after the actual invoices for EHESS, I continue to assist all our customers who have opted to pre-pay for the service, making sure that their deposits don't run out and helping to answer any other questions or assist with login issues where I can. I am very happy to be involved in facilitating a project that has proven to be of such value to our customers and appears to have grown in popularity since it started.
From an initial 96 HESS customers, the number of active EHESS customers has grown to 132 universities, 53 of which have also integrated EHESS into their DCS platform. We think this is a small landmark worth celebrating. It means that the collaboration has proven successful so far and that the provision of high quality, OCR-ready and DRM free scans with a 48-hour turnaround is supporting the needs of the HE sector.
To date, EHESS has delivered an impressive volume of copies, over 24,000 chapters and articles, consisting of over half a million individual pages. Of this total, about 11,000 chapters or articles were ordered as CFP copies and the rest as high-quality scans of material already owned by the customer.
Of course, change is always a little difficult and I am the first to admit that we had a few teething problems to start with. Customers were used to receiving both their scans and invoices from the BL, so the move away from this to a system where CLA dealt with the invoicing, but now on a different account code, while BL continued to supply the scans as before ... was a little bit confusing. But all in all, I hope I am not just speaking for myself when I say that we have overcome this initial confusion and the service now works very well for everyone, with the EHESS user experience a smooth one overall.
While we are talking about EHESS related confusion, it is worth noting here that not everything that is included in the CLA Licence repertoire for copying is also available as a copyright fee paid copy from the British Library and that not all material that is available from the BL is covered by the CLA Licence. This is because copying permissions that publishers give to CLA for copying under the CLA Licence may be different to the permissions publishers extend to the BL for the supply of copyright-fee paid copies. It is always worth using the Check Permissions tool on our website to check copying permissions, if you are planning to make further copies of your CFP copy. Something else you might not be aware of is that since the relaunch of the CLA website last year, customers are now able to view their transaction and invoicing history via the CLA Dashboard.
EHESS has certainly come a long way since 2015 and we are pleased to be part of a service that has become so popular with our customers. I hope it will continue to provide valuable content to HEIs going forward.
About the Author
Margret is Education Customer Services Coordinator at CLA and she is here to provide guidance on Licence related questions and permissions queries, as well as helping our customers make the most of what the CLA Education Licences have to offer. Margret has been with CLA in various Customer Service related roles for more than six years. Before joining CLA she worked as Foreign Rights Manager in children's book publishing, graduated in Cultural Studies and English Literature and worked as a qualified bookseller in England and Germany.
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