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National Lexis-Nexis Deal
- To: liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
- Subject: National Lexis-Nexis Deal
- From: Ann Okerson <aokerson@pantheon.yale.edu>
- Date: Mon, 29 Jun 1998 17:30:32 -0400 (EDT)
- Reply-To: liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
- Sender: owner-liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
A first -- thanks to Jane Holmquist for sending this along from
the Chronicle of Higher Education. The Moderators
______________
Date: Mon, 29 Jun 1998 11:34:04 -0400
From: Jane Holmquist <jane@phoenix.Princeton.EDU>
Organization: Princeton University
[ ] Friday, June 26, 1998
[Search the Site]
[ ]
[Browse the Site] 600 University Libraries to Get Lexis-Nexis
Data-Base Access, Along With Ads
[Today's news]
[Information technology] By JEFFREY R. YOUNG
[This Week's Chronicle]
[Publishing] Lexis-Nexis plans to announce a deal today with
[Money] more than 600 university libraries that will
[Government & Politics] bring a limited version of the company's data
[New grant competitions] base to millions of students and professors.
[Opinion & Arts]
[International] The company's popular data base allows easy
[Information Bank] access to thousands of newspapers, magazines,
[Issues In Depth] journals, and other documents.
[Jobs]
[Front Page] The one-year deal, for which the libraries are
paying more than $4-million, is said to involve a
----------------- record number of college and university libraries
About The Chronicle in a single contract. Twenty-three library
--------------- consortia and three individual libraries worked
How to register together to negotiate the agreement.
---------------
How to subscribe Both the company and some library officials say
--------------- the deal is an experiment. Some librarians worry
Help about a stipulation that lets Lexis-Nexis sell
--------------- advertisements on the service. Other librarians
Feedback say the version of Lexis-Nexis being offered to
----------------- universities isn't useful enough, because only
the first page of a document can be searched.
(The complete document can then be retrieved.)
And the company says it isn't sure the price is
high enough to make a profit.
The deal was to be formally announced today at
the annual conference of the American Library
Association, which concludes on July 1.
Participating colleges will have on-campus access
to Lexis-Nexis's service for universities, called
Academic Universe. It is offered by a subsidiary
of Lexis-Nexis called Congressional Information
Service Inc., and contains fewer sources than the
parent company's popular data base.
The main benefit of the service, however, is that
it can be used through the World-Wide Web and
requires no special training. The traditional
service uses a text-based interface that is more
difficult to operate. Some colleges subscribe to
the Web-based service for most users and pay
extra for some researchers to use the
more-expensive traditional service.
The Academic Universe service has been available
since last August, but some librarians told the
company that the price was too high. At small
colleges, the service costs $5 or $6 per eligible
user. So the president of Congressional
Information Service, Mark L. Capaldini, offered a
group of library officials a deal: The company
would allow multiple library consortia to join in
a single contract, and the price would be based
on how many users were involved. The more users,
the lower the price per person.
In just three months, library leaders gathered a
broad coalition. In the end, the contract
included more than 3.7 million users, and the
cost was down to $1.52 per person.
"There's never been a deal like this before,"
says Tom Sanville, a spokesman for the
International Coalition of Library Consortia.
There have been a few instances in which two or
three consortia worked together on a contract, he
says, but the scale of the Lexis-Nexis agreement
is "unprecedented."
Although not every library in the participating
consortia opted to join, many were interested in
offering the data base on their campuses, says
Mr. Sanville, who is also executive director of
the OhioLINK library consortium. He says 50 of
its 56 colleges signed the contract.
The deal does have a catch, however. To help
offset its cost, the company plans to sell
advertising on the service.
["The A-word got the understandable types of
reactions," says Ann Okerson, associate
university librarian at Yale University, who
attended the meeting where the company made its
first pitch.
Would students be bombarded with ads from
cigarette or beer companies? Would users waste
time on library computers touring Nike's Web
site? "Appropriate use is a topic that has been a
concern," she says.
The company agreed to form an advisory council of
librarians and company officials to set
guidelines for advertising. The company's Mr.
Capaldini says draft guidelines restrict ads to a
single square in the upper-right-hand corner of
the screen. "We've specifically excluded alcohol
and tobacco," he adds.
"I think that it will be much less noticeable
than the ads you see on the Web today," he says.
Ms. Okerson says librarians were persuaded to
accept the ads, because the alternative would
have been an increase of 40 per cent to 70 per
cent in the service's cost. "If this really
significantly controls costs, and if we can be
involved with shaping this advertising, it's
certainly worth exploring," she says.
Some librarians have complained that the Academic
Universe service is not comprehensive enough to
serve the needs of researchers. "The basic
problem, from our point of view, is you can no
longer, in Academic Universe, search the full
text of the articles," says Robert Walther, a
reference librarian at the University of
Pennsylvania. The service allows users to search
headlines and the text of the first page of most
articles, he says.
Mr. Capaldini says scaling back the service was
the only way to offer it at a lower price. "We
set up the menus so that you can't do an
incredibly resource-intensive search," he says.
The company's former college plan, which did
allow full searching, was "grossly unprofitable,"
he notes, because researchers often did
more-complicated searches than traditional
customers, but paid less.
[SNIP]
To further trim costs, some publications are not
Library officials who brokered the deal say it
may set a precedent for group purchasing. "It's a
win-win for both corporate entities and
libraries," says Angee Baker, director of
electronic information services for the
Southeastern Library Network, known as SOLINET.
It is coordinating the billing for the deal with
Lexis-Nexis.
"I would hope that other corporate entities will
take a look at this new model and evaluate it in
terms of a way to cooperate and work with
libraries to provide an affordable cost to
libraries while at the same time growing their
market or growing their business," she says.
Background story from The Chronicle:
* "Lexis-Nexis Announces New Service
for Colleges," 8/28/97
----------------------------------------------------
Copyright � 1998 by The Chronicle of Higher
Education
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