Electronic Database Pricing

This blog post covers:

Electronic journal pricing: A variety of models. Fischer, Christine. (2006). Against the Grain 18 (3).

This week's blog post covers another article from the journal about journals, Against the Grain. It is a short description of the current market for electronic databases, thankfully without the distracting markup of the last article. The article focuses mostly on academic libraries, and is sufficiently vague as to not call out any specific schools. Vendors are named when their pricing models differ greatly from others, but not in a way that is meant to reprimand them. I appreciated Fischer's ability to look at the bright side; she mentions that one positive about getting bundled resources that you did not initially want to order is that you may find that patrons are making use of the tools.

One thing I really liked about this article is that it was clear and factual without being dry. It also did not fall in to the same cadence of complaints that I see in many articles about electronic journal and database pricing: that it is much too expensive, that it will be the downfall of all human society, and so on. I appreciated reading a straight telling of what the market is like and what to expect. In addition, although it did leave some ambiguity, unlike the Harris book, Licensing Digital Content, the book was not totally vague and specific examples were given, even in the four short pages of the article. Without saying it as frequently as Harris, the same main messages were clear from Fischer's article. First, that there is no one-size-fits-all licensing agreement for schools. Second, that different companies offering digital content do different things, including using different pricing standards. Third, that there are benefits to dealing with content providers as a consortium. Lastly, that looking at the pricing models in a novel way may still allow for access, even if the initial quote is not possible within the budgetary requirements of the institution. All were main points from Harris' book, simply boiled down. Whereas Harris' book could be seen as the handbook for licensing content in libraries, Fischer's article could be seen as the introductory primer to the uninitiated.

When I worked at the Art Library, I had to do a project where I had to search a plain text database that contained the names of all of the databases that University of Wisconsin-Madison subscribed to, in order to identify ones that could be art historical in nature. I was blown away by how many obscure titles we subscribed to, and I wondered at that time how I had never heard of them. I did not realize before this course that many of those titles must have been value-adds to packages that we subscribe to for one of the bigger databases. This makes sense to me now. I also think that it is a matter of marketing. The "Databases by Subject" page on the Libraries webpage favors certain electronic resources over others. It makes me wonder how many times I have overlooked a smaller database that could be helpful for my task. I also wonder why these smaller databases are not simply combined with others to create larger databases? Perhaps this is yet to come for the semester.