Many of you will have seen (or will soon see) the article in today's Campus Marketplace which announces an exciting new initiative in the digital content space for college stores. This new venture is an important component in implementing the strategic goals for the digital content area approved by the NACS Board earlier this year. Those goals were outlined in a prior post to this blog. Both those goals and this model grow out of ideas and discussions that surfaced in other initiatives, such as the Forum on New Modes of Information Delivery NACS co-hosted with EDUCAUSE and ACRL back in March 2007.
There is still much work to be done and we are very interested in talking with content providers in course materials and digital content, as well as some potential partners on the infrastructure side. In the coming weeks and months I will post more information about the initiative here and answer questions submitted to me where possible. We are still working out many of the technology and content partnerships, but approval by the NACS Board for the conceptual business design and model is a key step forward in providing stores with an easy, affordable, and scalable solution to digital content delivery on campus. We see opportunities for stores whether they be institutional, organizational, independent, private, or contract managed. The platform created by the new venture will ultimately give stores new opportunities to provide products and services to students and faculty, and open doors for new conversations with campus libraries, technology units, and other campus constituents.
This initiative is also being announced by Melanie Sparks, President of the NACS Board, in her opening remarks at Innovate! 2008 which begins today. More on that in this weekend's postings.
