Project MUSE News: Integrated Books + Journals beta site released

["Melanie Schaffner" <melanie@muse.jhu.edu>]

Project MUSE Beta Site offers preview of integrated book and 
journal content

Project MUSE has released a beta web site previewing its combined 
digital book and journal content. The beta site, 
http://beta.muse.jhu.edu, will be available through the end of 
this year, allowing scholars, librarians, and students to become 
familiar with the newly enhanced platform before the changeover 
to accommodate MUSE's forthcoming eBook Collections on January 1, 
2012.

The beta site showcases Project MUSE's sophisticated new 
cross-content, faceted search functionality, and allows browsing 
of books and journals side-by-side. A powerful new hierarchical 
subject structure permits users to drill down to the most 
relevant content, and encourages discovery. Over 300 digital 
books, from 27 publishers, are available for free sample access 
on the site during the beta period. The MUSE collections 
launching in January will encompass over 12,000 book titles from 
the University Press Content Consortium (UPCC), a collaborative 
of more than 65 major university presses and related scholarly 
publishers. The beta site is still in active development, with 
many additional features planned for inclusion prior to January.

Project MUSE's beta site also includes the complete content from 
the nearly 500 distinguished scholarly journals now available on 
the current MUSE site. Visitors to the beta site will have access 
to the same content for which they have rights on the current 
site, via their institutional affiliation and associated 
subscriptions. New easy-to-follow icons clearly distinguish 
content which is available in full text to the user, a free 
sample or open access, or restricted.

The new search functionality on the beta site provides a search 
box on every page, with an option for the user to search both 
books and journals or choose just one content type. Once search 
results are returned, facets allow for further filtering the 
results by research area, author, language, and content type, and 
to only material for which the user has full text access. Search 
results may include journal articles or book chapters, with 
multiple results from a single book title rolled up into a single 
cumulative entry. Efforts are ongoing to optimize the search 
function to return the most relevant results with the best 
possible speed.

Browsing of book and journal content is available by title, 
publisher, and research area. MUSE is implementing a new 
hierarchical structure of academic research areas, promoting 
discovery of pertinent content while moving from a broad survey 
through to specific sub-disciplines. With over 12,000 books 
anticipated for inclusion in MUSE's initial ebook collections, 
the new structure will provide a powerfully efficient path to the 
most needed material.

At the individual book level, users can browse chapter-level 
snippets and view pertinent details about each title. A "Search 
Inside This Book" feature allows for discovery within the book 
content without leaving the title's main page. Breadcrumbs 
leading back to the hierarchical research areas provide paths to 
related books and journals.

Many features are still in development on Project MUSE's new site 
and will be released over the next few months. The following will 
be available by the formal site launch on January 1, 2012, for 
both books and journal articles: enhanced Related Content links; 
improved saving, viewing, and exporting of citations; 
content-integrated "More by this Author" links; and emailing, 
bookmarking, and sharing capabilities. Support for OpenURL 
functionality and Shibboleth authentication will also be in place 
by January 1.

Project MUSE eBook Collections will provide libraries, 
researchers, and students access to a wealth of high quality 
book-length scholarship, fully integrated with MUSE's essential 
electronic journal collections in a user-friendly environment 
with rich discovery features. MUSE books will be released 
electronically simultaneous with print publication, in PDF 
format, searchable and retrievable to the chapter level. 
Frontlist, backlist, interdisciplinary, and subject-specific 
collections will be available for purchase, with perpetual access 
rights, unlimited simultaneous usage of book content, no DRM and 
no restrictions on printing or downloading. COUNTER-compliant 
usage statistics, as well as free MARC records, will be available 
for books on MUSE. Details on available collections, purchase 
options, and prices will be announced no later than October 1, 
2011. The new, integrated Project MUSE web site, including book 
collections, will be live on January 1, 2012. More details are 
available at http://muse.jhu.edu/ebooks.

Project MUSE is a leading provider of digital humanities and 
social science content; since 1995, its electronic journal 
collections have supported a wide array of research needs at 
academic, public, special, and school libraries worldwide.

Melanie Schaffner
Marketing and Sales Manager, Project MUSE
The Johns Hopkins University Press
2715 N Charles St.
Baltimore, MD 21218 USA
P 410-516-3846
F 410-516-3846
mbs@press.jhu.edu
http://muse.jhu.edu