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How can you save my library money?
Texans we may be a bit too blunt and a bit too simple-minded, but one of the first question we ask any vendor is "How can you and your products help the library save money?" If all of us went to ALA midwinter next month, and asked every vendor the question, "How can you save me money," BEFORE we let them get into their spiel about the various wonders of their products - then maybe a few changes in pricing models and product designs would actually result. Comparatively simple efforts such as this would effectively communicate library needs in a way that no amount of long-winded individual conversations with vendors at our respective libraries ever could. When we ask questions such as this we all help each other by making vendors sit up and realize that we are serious when we say that there are library needs that the vendors aren't meeting. In other markets when the customers demand lower prices, the marketplace creates appropriate products. When any one of us accepts pricing models and license terms that we know are harmful to our library and to other libraries, we should rightly feel a bit chagrined. But there are things we can do, and just communicating to vendors that we want them to meet OUR needs and not to design yet another product that they think we should have and charge what they want to charge, is one way we can exert some leadership on behalf of our constituents Until we start asking these question of every vendor we meet - we will deserve the pricing and services we get. This thread originally started out with a question asking other libraries how they weigh the ISI request that we all pay one more time for the backfile information in the Web of Science when we have all jointly paid millions of dollars for its creation in the first place. In the actual discussions of this product among the librarians at Texas, the question that we kept asking ourselves was -- Does this product in any way help us meet our most pressing need, i.e. the need for a more cost effective way to provide our users with the information they need? While we asked the obvious questions of ISI about their use of sici codes, their plans for appopriate to the desktop performance, and we checked their records against other vendors to get a measure of the accuracy of their data - these standard evaluations paled beside the overriding questions of the price and the value we would receive for that price. The needs of libraries have changed dramatically over the past decade, and a question we probably should all be asking ourselves is, what do we expect from library vendors today? Ten or fifteen years ago when funding was relatively plentiful and Internet databases were few, we asked simple questions about scope and content. Today, at least in Texas, we find ourselves asking different questions: 1. How can this product save me money? 2. Does this product provide effective and reliable performance to my user's desktops? And we are really not interested in excuses such as "Internet slowdowns in the afternoon are to be expected", or "yes PDF files are huge and take forever to load on a user's desktop - but they are cheap for the publishers to create, etc. etc." All we are interested in, is whether the products we select perform. If a product doesn't perform - sell it to someone else. 3. Accuracy of records and retrieval systems. One thing the web has done is make it extremely easy to compare the accuracy of one vendor's records and indexing against that of another vendor side by side. What we have found when doing this never fails to surprise us. A single issue of a periodical receives vastly different indexing from different vendors. The co-author of an article will be indexed in one database and not in another etc. Records from the same vendor are treated differently at different times. What we have found is that vendor reputation is not a guarantee of accuracy and you need to check to see if you are getting what you think you are. 4. Does the product meet the library's needs in ways that similar products from other vendors do not? Is the pricing more reasonable, do the license terms fit our needs better, does the product's scope include scholarly information on the internet that is not part of the traditional literature, does the vendor have a plan to deal with the continuing changes and deterioration in the scholarly communication process, if the vendor markets e-journals can the library purchase the articles it wants without purchasing the entire journal, etc. In other words, libraries can no longer purchase all the information that our users expect us to - and with this impossibility comes a certain freedom. We now have the freedom to expect vendors to meet our needs in a realistic way. Vendors can no longer tell us that we must have journal X or index Y because our users demand it. We've had to cancel countless numbers of these "must have' journals and indexes already. In the sixties there was a catch phrase "freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose" While we aren't at this point yet, it's not much more than a hat toss away. Texans have a phrase "All hat and no cattle." This phrase applies to pretend cowboys that dress and talk the part, but are really pharmacists and lawyers pretending to be what they aren't. If librarians want vendors to meet library needs, then we need to stand up for our users, stand up for the librarians who went before us and built the collections we work in, stand up for the profession and the library ideal, and speak up - or we are also going to be "all hat and no cattle." The decline of our individual purchasing power has changed the way we all weigh and evaluate our selection options. I don't want to be in a postion where I am providing my users with great access to a very few incredibly expensive databases (hats)- but giving them little access to the breadth and depth of information that earlier generations of librarians built into to the collections I inherited (cattle). This is why it seems imperative that we let vendors know that price is an issue, and that we think there are efforts and approaches that they can take that will better serve their customer (us). Dennis Dillon Collections and Information Resources The University of Texas at Austin
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