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More on Lexis
The University of Texas recently talked to two representatives from LEXIS/NEXIS Academic and Educational Programs about their web service. They still expect to have pricing available by ALA. The ballpark figure that we were quoted for their web service, for our single campus, was several hundred thousand dollars more than we are currently paying. We now have 39 full-service ports. We requested and were given an analysis of LEXIS/NEXIS usage by our campus users which showed that the majority of the usage was for general interest news and business information. We stressed that they did have competitors offering full-text news and information services at prices more in line with what academic institutions have traditionally come to expect, and that in light of the proposed magnitude of their price increases, that we were actively considering our options and talking with other vendors. In the past, our library was perhaps amiss, in that we did not hold LEXIS/NEXIS to the same standards and expectations that we did for other information vendors. With their new pricing system, we are now increasingly interested in getting value for our money. We pointed out that unlike some of our other full-text web vendors, they were not offering images along with their text, and that their web display options in general were less than some of their competitors. The move to the web has also of necessity resulted in changes as to how the database is searched, which we will need more time to evaluate. We also mentioned the magnitude of the changes that we would have to make to the library acquisitions budget to fund the LEXIS/NEXIS web service, and the difficulty that cutting back on scholarly resources in order to fund a general interest databases would cause our library on campus. We forgot to ask about inquire about their java plans, but we repeatedly made the point that libraries needed some way to exert control over the pricing of web products - and that Texas preferred a simultaneous user model, instead of a flat fee based on FTEs, since we were unlikely to be able to afford the LEXIS/NEXIS web FTE pricing as currently structured. Dennis Dillon Head, Collections and Information Resources The University of Texas at Austin dillon@mail.utexas.edu
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