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Overview
Numérique Premium is a new digital books platform including works from 50 French-speaking publishers and societies. The ebooks are offered for annual subscription or one-off purchase in thematic collections.This e-books database is intended to provide access to secondary works and some compilations of source materials in both “humanities and social sciences.”
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CRL Review
Collection Content
Numérique Premium is a new digital books platform including works from sixty French-speaking publishers and societies. The ebooks are offered for annual subscription or one-off purchase in thematic collections.This e-books database is intended to provide access to secondary works and some compilations of source materials from a variety of publishers in both “humanities and social sciences.” However, in its early stages it is oriented much more toward the humanities than to quantitative social science content.
There are 35 collections or groups of e-books, with an initial goal of providing at least 80 titles per collection. At the time of this review, there was just a total of over 6,300 titles available. Some collections were relatively small, while others contained 180 or more. The scope of the collections varies considerably, from the broad “Histoire ancienne” and “Histoire contemporaine” to a collection on “de Gaulle” (French leader Charles de Gaulle), and a valuable collection of primary material and essays on author Émile Zola. There are also 73 subject headings with further specific sub-categories, covering the arts, law, geography, history, literature, philosophy, psychoanalysis, psychology, education, and religions.
The material tends toward cultural criticism, with the exception of the “Géopolitique” section, which contains typical political science studies.
Delivery
Metadata
While there are MARC records available for the titles, they are in UNIMARC format instead of MARC21. American libraries preferring MARC21 format may have to pay an additional fee for crosswalked records, which is unfortunate.
Platform
The interface at the time of this review was in beta stage, developed “in partnership with [the firm] Publishing Technology.” The titles are accessible by browsing the collections, subject facets, or full title list. There is also a search and advanced search function. While the interface suggests that the user can select to search full text within a specific title, the results are not conclusive. This is probably because there are no pointers from search results to specific snippets, words in context, or even page references to where the search terms might appear within the body of a title. In fact, the “search . . . within the fulltext” command displays only the appearance of terms within extended abstract summaries of the book’s contents. This is a major deficiency. The in text search feature exists in the eReader environment though.
For each title the user can view a linked table of contents (not yet available for all titles), a preview of the first 20 pages (not yet available for all titles), or a view of full text. Navigation within the books did not at the time offer the flexibility of a typical commercial e-book platform. One had to click “next” or “previous” to advance pages; scrolling was not possible. There was no thumbnail overview of pages. Downloading or printing of chapters or individual text pages did not seem readily available from the interface; printing was only available for the descriptive entry. This too is a major deficiency. One can now use the 2-page or 1-page reader using the PDF scrolling style. There are now thumbnails beneath the reader screen. Printing Chapter or pages is now straightforward. Copy and paste (with ctrl C/ ctrl V on a PC) is now also available.
Strengths and Weaknesses
This database offers the potential for access to e-books in the French language which might be difficult to obtain otherwise. However, it is difficult to determine who would find this collection particularly useful at this stage. On the one hand, as scholarly studies the content may be too specialized for many undergraduates. On the other hand, the current extent of the collections is too limited to make it attractive to more advanced researchers, unless a specifically required title happened to appear exclusively here. As the number of titles expands the database could become more useful to scholars. There had been concerns about earlier versions of the interface; recent updates to the interface are in the process of being evaluated.
Appendix
Title List
Community Ratings
Content scope and completeness
Cost and price-structure
Platform and user interface