Re: PDA Sales: (was: Interview with Springer's Derk Haank)

[Sandy Thatcher <sandy.thatcher@alumni.princeton.edu>]

Article-by-article purchasing, and chapter-by-chapter purchasing, 
are already available in the marketplace through such services as 
offered by the CCC.

Sandy Thatcher


At 6:50 PM -0500 1/27/11, Rick Anderson wrote:

>>  While I'm thinking about it, if patron-driven purchasing is
>>  an alternative to book 'big deals', then surely the same
>>  could be true for journals? Patron-driven purchasing
>>  article-by-article (and for that matter, chapter-by-chapter)
>>  anyone?
>
>That's exactly right.  A journal subscription makes no sense, 
>really. It's just a small version of the Big Deal -- you buy a 
>whole bunch of stuff you don't need because it's bundled 
>together with the stuff you do. Article-by-article purchasing is 
>a much more rational way of acquiring journal content, and only 
>two things are stopping libraries (or my library, anyway) from 
>heading in that direction:
>
>1. Journal publishers not offering per-article purchase as an
>     option
>
>2. Journal publishers pricing individual articles at punitive
>     levels
>
>As our budgets continue to get tighter -- and they will keep 
>getting tighter for the foreseeable future -- it's going to get 
>harder and harder to justify buying articles we don't want.  I 
>think title-level journal acquisition is probably on the way 
>out.
>
>As for chapter-by-chapter purchasing of book content: why not? 
>Given the way books are very often used in libraries, it would 
>be great if we had the option of purchasing individual chapters 
>(or even pages) as well as buying the whole thing.
>
>Rick Anderson
>Assoc. Dir. for Scholarly Resources & Collections
>Marriott Library
>Univ. of Utah
>rick.anderson@utah.edu