Electronic Resources: Pricing Models and Economic Decisions for Academic LibrariesIS 567, Fall 2003 |
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II. Issues II-A. Organizational Issues II-A.1. Operating Costs II-A.2. Budget II-A.3. Archival Rights II-A.4. Equipment and Networking II-A.5. Personnel Skills and Training II-B. User Issues II-B.1. Computer Literacy II-B.2. Information Literacy II-B.3. Institutional Readiness II-B.4. Training and Alternatives III. Electronic Databases III-A. Pricing Models IV. Conclusion V. Bibliography |
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I. Introduction |
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Electronic resources (e-resources) provide enhanced access to materials, convenient searching capabilities, and obvious space and waste savings for libraries. As technology advances and makes electronic access easier and faster, librarians and other information professionals are met with the challenge of selecting quality products for their user populations. Libraries must be prepared to justify their decisions for different products. Due to increasing budget cuts in higher education, and with more and more information available on the Internet, librarians constantly face more calls to justify expenditures for electronic materials. In this paper, I will address some organizational factors of electronic collections, pricing models for one electronic product—databases, and user issues to be relevant to evaluating electronic databases. |
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II. Issues |
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Electronic resources consume a large portion of collection development budgets and call upon librarians to make difficult choices regarding purchases. Because these resources require more monetary support from the administration, and because the Internet offers numerous avenues to acquire information, librarians continually face defending their choices on purchases and explaining the value of these resources to administrators. To help justify these purchases, exposing their use and value, librarians need to create a more standardized method of evaluation, based on quantifiable measures. Often, however, the value of a product cannot be measured by numbers rather there are quality issues to be considered. Librarians must be able to describe the differences between products and explain why one product is a better value, at a higher price, for supporting the needs of their users. Prior to establishing an effective evaluation process, through which all electronic products will be filtered, libraries must tackle some overarching costs, some of which are not easily quantifiable. These costs are affected by two areas, organizational issues and user issues. Organizational issues that affect overall electronic collection development expenses include such things as operating costs, equipment and networking, personnel skills and training, archival rights, and budgeting. User issues include computer literacy, information literacy, institutional readiness and support, and training and print and software alternatives. Below I will describe these costs in more detail. |
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II-A. Organizational Issues |
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Electronic resource collection development must be supported at all levels within the organization. To effectively develop and support an electronic collection, administrators, policies, and staff must be prepared to maintain the collection. Problem solving can become more complicated with electronic resources. Librarians must determine if there problems are technical-, account-, or communication-oriented. Organizational issues of operating costs, equipment, personnel, archival rights, and budgets must be addressed and constantly considered in the evaluation process. |
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II-A.1 Operating Costs |
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The operating costs associated with electronic resources include budget, networks and equipment, and staff time and training. With the integration of electronic resources, organizations must absorb the costs of staff retraining, with recognition that some staff may need reassignment or certain duties moved to different departments. Organizational readiness, including planning, infrastructure and communication, selection and acquisition, access, staff changes, system changes and departmental reorganization, server space and maintenance, and administrative support are essential to the development and continued success of electronic collections. Drexel University’s aggressive change to a predominant e-journal collection would not have occurred, if, as Hansen-Montgomery and Sparks (2000) point out, these elements of organizational readiness were not in place. These same components apply to electronic databases. Electronic resources require significant planning for changes in access, delivery and training, implementation of software and data file upload, and communication to user populations and stakeholders. Selection and acquisition of electronic databases requires increased time for evaluation, standards of comparison, pro-active leadership and guidance, and buy-in and support from administrators. New interfaces, technological advances, and changes in standards, can cause accessibility changes that are database specific. Not only are accessibility factors such as link servers (SFX) and remote access (EZProxy) important, but so are issues of compatibility with various browsers, different platforms, JavaScript and port needs, and user controls for text size and print preferences. |
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II-A.2. Budgeting |
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Library budget constraints and organizational fiscal policy changes often dictate choices and reallocation of resources. Although librarians and collection development managers operate within the parameters of a specified annual budget, database costs increase, often exceeding the collections budget. When costs outweigh budget allocations, organizations must make tough decisions on whether to cut resources or reallocate funds. UT Libraries are currently addressing a dramatic change in fiscal policy, which requires that any product costing more than $2000 be put out for bid. This new requirement severely limits the ability of librarians to offer their users the best product, based on their own evaluation, and creates the very real possibility that the lowest bidder, often meaning low quality products, will support faculty and student research. Because of this change, the UT Libraries recently created an Electronic Resources Task Force to evaluate electronic databases that are available from multiple vendors and currently up for contract renewal. The task force found numerous problems with evaluating electronic databases through a bid process. Some of the problems include evaluation process taking time and staff resources, vendors offering the same database (product) with different elements (title list, indexing), and time sensitivity (between semesters, impact on library instruction) to name a few. Once librarians make qualitative and quantitative evaluations of each product, the implementation of changes and associated costs of user re-training and institutional justification lead to added costs that are rarely, if ever, factored in to the overall equation. These costs include development of standard evaluation procedures, often needing to be altered for each product or evaluation process. |
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II-A.3. Archival Rights |
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A current concern among libraries is the archival rights to material within electronic resources. Historically, libraries purchased runs of serials and therefore always had access to and ownership of the information. With the push towards electronic resources, libraries now face the possibility of a lack of access to historical information, which often leads to purchasing both the print and electronic products. This decision both increases overall cost and puts pressure on the library to find additional space in which to house and maintain the print collection. Drexel University pioneers in this area, making the leap of faith that such resources as JSTOR will effectively resolve the availability of archival materials. However, more libraries face the difficult decision of what to collect and when to rely solely on electronic resources for information. |
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II-A.4. Equipment and Networking |
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The organization must be prepared to purchase and support new technology and offer users quality equipment and networks to use electronic resources. Software upgrades, programming support, and technical staff are essential parts of the electronic collection development scenario. Systems and technical departments must be prepared to accommodate network changes necessary to support electronic resource requirements, such as scripts and software. Staff must be prepared to resolve dead links, downtime, and remote access problems as they occur. Without the staff, equipment, and network to support the technological intricacies of these e-resources, libraries will face increasing costs of staff time and user frustration, thus making the products value-less. Decisions about new databases or changes to different vendors must take the library equipment resources into consideration when evaluations are performed. |
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II-A.5. Personnel Skills and Training |
Libraries must also take into consideration, the effect of electronic collection on their staff. As information moves into the electronic format, staff must learn new technologies, they must be informed about common problems of networks, and they must be prepared to communicate the effective use of the resources to their users. Libraries must also reevaluate the qualifications of new staff as their collections move more and more into the electronic format. For example, staff members working in serials will need to understand the technological elements of the product in order to fix problems and communicate with vendors. Reference staff will need to understand some basic computing skills in order to teach the users how to use the products. Considerable amounts of time will be spent, on the part of staff, re-training themselves, creating instructional programs and communicating new strategies to users. New databases call for different methods of implementation, modified maintenance routines, and increased computer skills by staff. Organizations must be prepared to offer training or to reorganize departments depending on needs. |
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II-B. User Issues |
User issues include a computer literate audience, institutional readiness and support, training, print and software alternatives. The evaluation of electronic databases, from the users’ perspective, is expressed through ease of navigation, understandable and useful help screens, user-controlled printing options, and search capabilities. If a product does not return acceptable numbers of results that are relevant and useful, or if each vendor database version offers different title lists, the user will not get the same results. Users also must be computer literate in order to make use of the databases. If the database is confusing, the font is illegible, or features such as exporting, saving and emailing results are absent, the product will only frustrate users. If users become frustrated, the likelihood of that database proving cost-worthy goes down because the usage to price ratio goes up. |
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II-B.1. Computer Literacy |
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Large public university libraries face a greater problem related to computer literacy of their users. In order to make effective and efficient use of electronic materials, users must be computer literate. In the case of electronic databases, the interface must be navigable and understandable. Key elements in the interface, such as help screens, useful examples, and common search strategies are critical to providing an effective product. When interfaces are complex, hard to understand, and generally unappealing, users will avoid them, thus making them value-less to the organization. The most powerful electronic database is truly only as good as its interface if the audience is even moderately computer literate. Time taken to teach a student how to navigate the Internet or to become comfortable using a computer to search for information must be a consideration when evaluating electronic products, therefore the human-computer interaction element is a critical factor is the evaluation process. |
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II-B.2. Information Literacy |
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Much like computer literacy, users of electronic products must be information literate. Users who do not have information literacy skills, such as an understanding of web site evaluation, information usage, copyright restrictions, will consume much more of the librarian’s time than the information literate user. To address this need and its relation to electronic resources, libraries must offer instructional courses for students. If students do not understand the differences between information found on the Internet and information found in scholarly sources, the electronic databases the librarians slave to pick carefully will be virtually useless. |
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II-B.3. Insitutional Readiness |
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Along with organizational support on the part of the library, the overall institution must be prepared to shift to more and more online access. The institution must be prepared with computer literate and supportive faculty, higher administrative level financial and policy support, as well as technological and networking support. The library cannot address these issues on its own; it must have the support of the entire institution for electronic resources to be useful, effective, and valuable. |
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II-B.4. Training and Alternatives |
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Issues of access, with regard to disabled patrons, as well as issues of printing costs, must be addressed by any organization creating or maintaining an electronic resource collection. While standards and guidelines provide access to information for disabled users, by means of voice recognition, text enlargers, and other specialized software, these factors are sometimes overlooked when evaluating electronic resources. Additionally, both librarians and users must be trained to use the specialized, assistive software and tools. Compatibility with these types of assistive technologies is a key element to a valuable electronic resource. Printing costs have become one of the most expensive aspects of e-resource availability. At the University of Tennessee, printing costs increased 279% in one year www.lib.utk.edu/announce/ConservePaper.html. Researchers printed over 1 million pages during the month of September 2003, leaving most of these pages behind. Users must be informed about alternatives to printing materials, but vendors of electronic resources must likewise be attentive to potential waste and provide alternative methods of moving results between the computer and the user. Print alternatives such as email, saving to disc, output controls, and exporting to bibliographic software are becoming more critical elements of a quality product. |
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III. Electronic Databases |
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Electronic databases, only one of a host of library e-resources, are costly and require knowledgeable librarians to implement the software, keep abreast of changes, and address access problems. New studies concerning the usage of electronic databases are becoming critical to insuring effective use of resources. Research needs place further demands on staff time and training needs. Not only do decision-makers need information about usage statistics, but also about changes in database coverage, new distributors, new interfaces, and new pricing models. Technological advances have increased the demand for electronic databases and some publishers, such as IEEE (2003), are eliminating their print collections. Numerous databases offer similar content and there are constant fluctuations in coverage, distributors, and producers. Often the challenges to librarians are to verify they are indeed comparing apples to apples when choosing electronic databases. Factors such as value-added features, discount pricing and packaged delivery of databases serve only to cloud the overall picture and make the decision-making process more convoluted. Libraries make difficult technological choices. Some database changes ultimately make the product proprietary for a particular browser or platform. Librarians must ensure that a product will work well with the software used, such as SFX and EZProxy. Indeed, sometimes these “details” are missed or mis-represented and only discovered after the purchase of the product. |
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III-A. Pricing Models |
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Stephen Rhind-Tutt’s (2003) gives a good overview of a variety of pricing models. He states publishers and vendors of electronic products use over 20,000 kinds of pricing models that can be divided into four basic categories: usage based, discounts, value-added, and sponsored. Usage-based pricing “assumes a certain value for each action” (p. 52). There are defined limits to the meaning of use, including site licenses, IP addresses, number of searches, number of articles retrieved, and the like. Discounts in pricing are generally considered tactical, having a purpose of rewarding customers who help the company in some manner. Finally, value-added models attempt to differentiate customers based on a particular desirable feature. Value-added models are similar to value-removed models that disable or remove some feature to reduce the costs. Rhind-Tutt writes that since publication of his 1988 article, “A Review of Pricing Models and The Forces that Move Them,” two new pricing models have been developed, while three older models have been discontinued. Changes in pricing models reflect technological advances that have made them either necessary or obsolete, such as charging for WANs or LANs or geographic location or IP address. The two new models are DialUnit, a model developed by Dialog, defined as “a measure of system resources used to execute search and display commands” (2003, p. 54), and the netLibrary model, one that mimics the physical world, wherein a user “checks out” the resource, making it unavailable to other users. The chart below, taken from Rhind-Tutt’s 2003 article, shows the variety of pricing models available.
So what constitutes value in an electronic database, and why are pricing models so numerous? Rhind-Tutt’s article “A Review of Pricing Models and the Forces that Drive Them” (1998) suggests five forces that drive the complexity of pricing models. These forces are:
In addition, in the 2003 article:
Key factors that change the value of a product are subjective, and therefore pricing models are subjective. Since producers and vendors of electronic resources are in business to make money, they have authority to alter the pricing model to accommodate needs and desires of clients. Some of these subjective value statements, according to Rhind-Tutt (2003), include:
Consortial agreements can produce positive contractual agreements for libraries and database producers. However, the agreements can also be stifling or simply negative with regard to changes in database choices—especially affected by institutional constrictions or policy changes, or with regard to contract negotiations. Consortial agreements and purchases require additional communications between partners, between representative bodies and database producers/vendors, and between libraries and their user populations. Consortial partners must be more cognizant of the pricing models being offered by the vendor/producer, as illustrated in Michele Newberry’s Op-Ed piece, “The Consortium and the IP: A Tale of Renewal” (2001). Reorganizations of databases can mean a decrease in content availability and access, or it can mean added value elements for the customer. |
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IV. Conclusion |
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Pricing models and electronic databases will continue to change with technology and customer requests. Despite the incredible number of pricing models available, no one model will work best for all institutions, not even one model will work best among similar institutions. Future research needs to focus on the manner in which institutions decide among various products. These decisions may become more difficult with time because vendors, producers, librarians, and users are discovering the type of interface and availability that is critical to their work. In the near future, decisions will not be based on full-text availability; retrieval rates, reliability studies, and the like will become determining factors in selecting among similar products. With the push for purely electronic access, libraries will have to reformulate their collection development and evaluation procedures and to increase budget allocations for electronic resources, in order to maintain access to materials. |
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V. Bibliography: |
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