Re: Control of concurrent users

[David Goodman <dgoodman@Princeton.EDU>]

Don, don't many of your users access the journal without going through
your web page-- by using links from other journals or from databases like
Pubmed and Inspec, or by going directly to the publisher's site?

David Goodman
Biology Librarian, and
Co-Chair, Electronic Journals Task Force
Princeton University Library
dgoodman@princeton.edu         http://www.princeton.edu/~biolib/
phone: 609-258-3235            fax: 609-258-2627


 --

Don Wassink wrote:
> 
> I would not interpret 'all resonable endeavours' to include having the
> library control the number of concurrent users.  That is unreasonable, and
> we've never met a vendor with such a requirement.  If your vendor truly
> requires that, then I would start looking for an acceptable alternative.
> 
> We routinely and automatically keep statistics on the 'hits' on our
> web-server, including individual pages, and how many times the script is
> used to access any particular database.  (I guess there are various
> software programs that will do this.)  This is useful from a collection
> development point-of-view, but it can also be useful for negotiating a
> concurrent user license with a vendor.  If, for example, you can show that
> a database is accessed on average only 60 times per month, then you can
> easily argue for a single user license.  Any reputable vendor should
> recognize the merit of such an argument, or again, time to look somewhere
> else.
> 
> Don Wassink
> Associate University Librarian
> Hong Kong University of Science & Technology