Survey of Library Database Licensing Practices Published

[primarydat@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:

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 partners 
- 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