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Press Release from Primary Research Group, Inc.
Primary Research Group has published The Survey of Library Database
Licensing Practices (ISBN #: 1-57440-093-2). The study presents data from 90
libraries – corporate, legal, college, public, state, and non-profit libraries – about
their database licensing practices.
Just a few of the study’s thousands of findings are:
• Mean spending by corporate and legal libraries in the sample on Ebook
licenses was $48,000.
• The mean number of independent licenses for electronic content held by
the libraries in the sample tripled from 2000 to 2007.
• 19.42% of the licenses held by the libraries in the sample restricted the
number of simultaneous users.
• Consortium purchases accounted for a mean of 30% of the database licenses
by the libraries in the sample.
• The mean perceived price increase for electronic and electronic/print
combination journals was 10.64%.
• Database purchases through consortiums over the past two years appear to
be increasing. Half of all respondents indicated that consortium contracts as a
percentage of all contracts have remained the same, while 23% reported growth
of less than 5%. Another 19% reported growth of more than 5%, while only 7%
reported that the percentage of contracts through consortiums had decreased.
• The majority of our sample, 82%, had never attempted to negotiate any
special language on the provision of interlibrary loan materials through email or
other internet technology
• College/university libraries’ single largest consortium partner accounted
for a mean of just over 41% of contracts, twice as much as for public or
government and non-profit libraries.
• Participants reported spending an average of $7,300 on dues and fees to
consortiums.
• Libraries reported mean price increases for full text and newspaper and
magazine databases of 9.43% in the past year.
• The mean reported annual increase in the price of medical and biochemical information was 8.13%.
• Participants estimated spending an average of 290.49 hours of library staff
time reviewing contract terms from vendors of all kinds of licenses for content in
the past year.
• A shade more than 7% of the libraries in the sample had ever been
threatened by a publisher or information vendor with any form of legal action for
contract abrogation.
• Nineteen percent of libraries with expenditures below $35,000 believed
they had “a good idea of what others were paying” for their licenses, nearly four
times the rate of libraries with database expenditures exceeding $500,000.
• Twenty-three percent of the libraries in the sample currently had
institutional digital repositories.
• Just over 14% of all libraries surveyed indicated that they extensively used
free access to back issues of some journals that have an “embargo” period
before articles become available without charge.
• A mean of just over 24% of the electronic or electronic/print journal subscriptions maintained by survey participants guaranteed perpetual access to archives.
• Just 15% of libraries used an internal charge back system for end users to
help pay for the library’s database licenses. Libraries in the U.S. were slightly
more likely than non-U.S libraries to do this.
• Over a third of all respondents indicated that their course materials on
reserve were roughly equal degree paper and electronic.
• A mean of 4.35 librarians in the libraries sampled spent at least 10% of
their work time reviewing and choosing new electronic resources.
• Librarians in the sample estimated that just over a third of the sets of
access and usage statistics they received from vendors of electronic information
could be considered “highly reliable.”
• Just under 10% of all libraries surveyed reported that they had ever
canceled a content license because of the provider’s inability to effectively deal
with service interruption issues.
More than half of the participating libraries are from the USA, and the rest are
from Canada, Australia, the UK, and other countries. Four hundred tables of data
are broken out by type and size of library, as well as for overall level of database
expenditure. For more information, go to www.primaryresearch.com.
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