Re: A question of licences and Alumni members

[Ann Okerson <ann.okerson@yale.edu>]

John and others:  I understand the traditional arguments against including
alumni in licenses.  And I have two real-life questions:

1.  Under what conditions would electronic information providers include
alumni access to a given information resources?  Under a different license
altogether? Under the same license but more money? With certain
limitations?

2.  What if one's alumni association creates short continuing education
courses for those same alumni, at their request (they want to keep in
touch with former professors and learn from them, etc.).

Assume here that the courses are offered for free or at price that aims
to recover costs (not make money), and the individuals in the courses
can be identified and access given to enrollees only, with the rest of
alumni excluded.  

Would such a scenario be acceptable?  Would it require a whole separate
license negotiation (which, for, say, a 4 or 6-week course with a limited
enrollment of, say, 50 or fewer wouldn't likely be cost effective)? Would
inclusion of such alumni be acceptable under fairly common license
language that permits faculty, staff, and student access wherever they may
be located?  I would appreciate a discussion of such limited
alumni-as-student coverage and its relationship to all-alumni-all-the-time
kinds of licenses.

Thank you, Ann Okerson
Yale University Library

__________________________________

On Sun, 16 Jul 2000, John Cox wrote:

> One of the ways of including alumni is simply to treat them as walk-in
> users.  If alumni have continuing access to the library, they can be treated
> thus, but can only access online content from terminals in the library.
> 
> Most rights holders would object to alumni rights extending to remote
> access.  After all, there is 25-33% of the total student population
> graduating every year.  And such a large and dispersed population is almost
> impossible to identify and authenticate.
> 
> Besides this, why is it necessary or desirable to grant alumni continuing,
> or perpetual access?  There is a balance to be struck between the rights
> needed to ensure the institution can do its job in a proper and professional
> way, and the needs of rightsholders to manage their content in such a way
> that their businesses survive.
> 
> John Cox
> John.E.Cox@btinternet.com
> www.licensingmodels.com
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> >>> m.borchert@qut.edu.au 07/13/00 07:51PM >>>
> Dear Liblicencers,
> 
> My name is Martin Borchert. I am the Electronic Information Services
> Librarian at Queensland University of Technology (QUT), Australia.
> 
> Discussions with delegates at the IATUL Conference here at QUT last week
> indicated that some (at least) academic libraries in the US are routinely
> negotiating with suppliers of electronic products, that their Alumni
> members have perpetual access rights to those recources.
> 
> This sounds like a great service to be able to offer Alumni members.
> 
> My question to you is... Is it common or rarely that academic libraries
> routinely include Alumni within licence agreements, and are libraries
> generally successful in this?
> 
> We currently do not include Alumni in our negotiations, but it sounds very
> worthwhile.
> 
> Any advice, examples (within confidentiality requirements of course) or
> feelings you have on this would be greatly appreciated.
> 
> Thank you and best regards,
> 
> Martin
> 
> *******************************************
> Martin Borchert
> Electronic Information Services Librarian
> 
> ph. +61 7 3864 3470
> fax. +61 7 3864 5539
> m.borchert@qut.edu.au
> 
> Library Systems Group
> Level 3, D Block
> Library, Kelvin Grove Campus
> Queensland University of Technology
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