[Fwd: RE: [Fwd: Re: Article based subscription]]

["Wendy P. Lougee" <wlougee@umich.edu>]

As noted in an earlier submission, I'm forwarding comments from Professor
MacKie-Mason, the lead in the PEAK project research team.

Wendy Lougee
PEAK Project Director

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Prof. MacKie-Mason writes:

Paul Gherman notes that during the first year of the PEAK experiment, all
of the participating libraries purchased more "articles" than their
patrons ended up using.  (The libraries actually purchased "tokens" which
could then be used to obtain articles that users later requested.)  This
is correct.

However, we have just completed our first round of analysis of the second
year (actually 8 months) of PEAK usage, and have learned a couple of quite
interesting things on this point:

First, most of the participating libraries reacted to their first year
experience and changed their portfolio of access options during the second
year.  Most of them successfully moved in the direction of purchasing a
set of access options that more closely matched the usage over the next 8
months.  Thus, the fast feedback we could provide on system usage at the
level of the journal title and article title seems to have been quite
useful.

Second, at least through the first six months of 1999 it appears that
libraries quite accurately forecast their users' demand for articles
outside of traditional subscriptions.  That is, the libraries bought
"tokens" at the beginning of the year.  Those tokens were in fact used at
about the rate of one month's tokens per month through the first six
months of the year.

These and other initial findings from the PEAK project are reported in
"Pricing and Bundling Electronic Information Goods: Field Evidence", by
Jeff MacKie-Mason, Juan Riveros and Robert Gazzale, at
http://www.si.umich.edu/~prie/tprc/ABSTRACTS99/MACKIE-MASONPAP.PDF. Other
papers and presentations on the PEAK project can be found at the project
Web site, http://www.lib.umich.edu/libhome/peak/.

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Prof. Jeff MacKie-Mason     http://www-personal.umich.edu/~jmm/
Dept. of Economics and School      internet:      jmm@umich.edu
   of Information
Univ. of Michigan                     phone:       734-647-4856
Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1220                fax:       734-764-2475
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