[SigLT-L] Survey of Library Database Licensing Practices Published

[Primarydat at aol.com]

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.  
James Moses, Research Director 
Primary Research Group Inc. 
www.primaryresearch.com 




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