The Future of Commercial Electronic Content: Vendor Can You Spare a TOC?

Citation

Wilson, T.C. (2001), "The Future of Commercial Electronic Content: Vendor Can You Spare a TOC?", Library Hi Tech News, Vol. 18 No. 8. https://doi.org/10.1108/lhtn.2001.23918haf.001

The Future of Commercial Electronic Content: Vendor Can You Spare a TOC?

Thomas C. Wilson

Recently I began reflecting yet again on the changing nature of the electronic content we license or otherwise provide access to. I was reminded of the halcyon days of yore when the systems we commanded were arcanely sophisticated and pricey to say the least. But hey, it was the only show in town, there were no other alternatives for searching through portions of the world's literature and research. Because of the specialized skills needed to efficiently retrieve useful information from these systems and the cost being based on elapsed time, we limited searching, for the most part, to trained professional searchers. Some of us even limited the amount of information retrieved (e.g. citation data, no abstract) in order to control further the overall cost of the searches ­ the thinking then being that the requester could certainly retrieve the item from our print collections, or through interlibrary loan, for free. Why waste those precious online dollars?

My, how things have changed! Over the course of the past four decades, online information providers have explored a variety of methods for searching, presentation, delivery, and pricing. From a macro perspective, however, the trend has generally been to include more information (citation, citation with abstract, tables of contents, full-text or page images) for similar amounts of money or less. In other words, the move has been from providing surrogates to delivering the "real thing."

To some degree this change over time reflects improvements in technological capability and economic feasibility in this market. As computing power increased, more information could be brought online, processed, and delivered. As the necessary investment in computing infrastructure decreased in order to accomplish these tasks, more players could enter the market of online information provision. That development in turn fed the general recurring cycle of cost reductions over this period of time.

While this trend of more for less is interesting in its own right, it is now a part of the history of the late twentieth century. In addition to changes in the structure and pricing of electronic content, however, we have also begun to think very differently about electronic resources. I will leave to others the task of discussing the access versus ownership debate, print versus digital preservation, historical and archival access, and media conglomeration, all important topics. What interests me here is what we think we are paying for (in part as opposed to what a vendor may think we are paying for) in response to changes in electronic information structure and content ­ a gestalt of database searching as it were.

At some point in the past, we and our patrons were to some degree paying for the convenience of locating pointers to potentially useful information ­ some of which would have been difficult, if not impossible, to find in any other way. In addition to the usually high cost of telecommunications, the charges included database access time and in a number of cases fees per piece of surrogate information. Thus, we were not paying for access to the "real thing," we were paying for assistance in identifying what the "real thing" was. (There are some obvious caveats to the notion of surrogates, such as stock quotes, newspaper clippings, company reports, and the like.)

Now, let us fast-forward to the current scenario. Certainly the telecommunications scene has radically changed, and costs vis-à-vis services have drastically declined, although one could make the argument that the costs have just been institutionalized and become a part of the infrastructure (e.g. I earn my living doing this stuff.). But even in telecommunications, the pricing structure has moved in a similar direction as database access ­ that is, toward flat-fee pricing models.

With regard to database access the question remains: What are we paying for? While it is still true that we pay for many surrogates, a significant change is under way in terms of access to the "real thing" ­ the source: full text, page images, and other virtual objects. Not only have we seen a deluge of new electronic offerings from publishers and creators, but we have also experienced the addition of source material to traditional citation and abstract resources. We have observed entire museum exhibits going online and perhaps adding something beyond the "real thing." In fact, there has been a huge growth in the number of Web sites that temporally and substantively create relationships among heretofore unrelated, unlinked, interdisciplinary resources, providing information well beyond citations and descriptors ­ the kind of rich information stuff our patrons really want and need. (One could argue that librarians have been overly enamored of surrogates, but that is a topic for another column.)

Furthermore, this sumptuous information banquet is for the most part directly and freely available to anyone (not to diminish the complexity of finding some of it). Even more to the point, there are any number of sites, formal and informal, that provide surrogate services for free similar to the ones we used to pay for. For example:

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  Current Cites (http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/CurrentCites/ ) a monthly annotated bibliography of resources in information technology.

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  Edupage (http://www.educause.edu/pub/edupage/edupage.html) a thrice weekly summary of developments in information technology taken from industry and news publications.

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  PubMed (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/PubMed/) the Medline database.

There are also a variety of media rich sites such as:

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  American Memory Project (http://memory.loc.gov/).

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  Museums and Millennium (http://www.mumi.org/en/index.htm).

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  Climate Prediction Center (http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/index.htm.)

That is to say nothing about the commercial endeavors now available that provide free access to surrogates and only charge for access to the "real thing." For example:

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  questia (http://www.questia.com/Index.jsp) a collection of books and articles in the liberal arts.

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  BioMedNet (http://www.bmn.com/) a searchable database of biomedical journals featuring citations, abstracts and journal issue tables of contents.

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  Elsevier Science (http://www.elsevier.com/) citations, abstracts, and tables of contents of Elsevier publications.

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  Scirus (http://www.scirus.com/) a searchable index of science Web pages, ScienceDirect, Medline, BioMedNet, Beilstein on ChemWeb, Neuroscion, and BioMed Central.

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  XanEdu (http://www.xanedu.com/) an online course pack creator service that permits faculty, librarians, and other educational professionals affiliated with an educational institution to search through the ProQuest database and XanEdu collections of full text items for the purpose of producing class course packs.

The availability of such services on the Web for free suggests a significant shift in how certain types of electronic content are being delivered, particularly with regard to what we pay for. Furthermore, this positioning of products spurs competition in the online information market both in terms of pricing structures and the definitions of basic and value-added services. Yes, there are some disciplines that are less well represented in this market, but even that is changing in some surprising ways. And yes, it is true that not everything is on the Web. In comparison to what we used to pay for, however, what we (and our patrons) can access for free is impressive.

So, what will we pay for in the future? And what are the implications for the electronic content marketplace? Given the trends already under way, it is reasonable to project several things:

Increasingly more revenue will go toward vendors who provide the "real thing."

Citations, abstracts, and tables of contents will be considered passé and not worth paying for.

Vendors who do not go beyond surrogate provision will see their revenue streams diminish. This phenomenon is likely to hit third-party aggregators first.

Patrons will continue to demand more media-rich and interconnected resources.

Stay tuned, it will be an interesting future

Thomas C. Wilson(TWilson@uh.edu) is Head of Systems at the University of Houston Libraries, Houston, Texas.