Database Marketplace 2007: Not Your Family Farm
The information industry added value with unique content and custom tools as large search engines entered the market
By Carol Tenopir, Gayle Baker, & Jill E. Grogg -- Library Journal, 5/15/2007
The information industry continues to consolidate, just as agribusiness has consolidated and now dominates farming. Both the family farm and the small information company still exist but are becoming rarer in an age of mergers, acquisitions, and increased economies of scale. Small companies distinguish themselves by high quality, special themes, or useful tools to keep and build their customer base.
The database marketplace this year was dominated by the news of several large acquisitions. Wiley's purchase of Blackwell Publishing Ltd. drew concerns from members of the Information Access Alliance (IAA), made up of representatives from SLA, the American Library Association, Association of Research Libraries, and other library groups. The IAA is particularly concerned with continued market consolidation among commercial scholarly publishers.
Other acquisitions occurred in the database and secondary publisher fields. In March 2007, Elsevier, a publisher that has raised IAA's concerns in the past, announced its acquisition of the Beilstein Database, the well-known organic chemistry fact book and database. Elsevier had been involved with the Beilstein-Institut in the database's production and marketing since 1998 before acquiring it outright in 2007. Cambridge Information Group (CIG) acquired ProQuest and formed ProQuest CSA, which extended both its indexing and abstracting services and full-text articles. OCLC purchased RLG to create a single mega-shared cataloging company in a world that once had several competitors (remember WLN?). OCLC's new WorldCat.org service included several features from RLG's discontinued RedLightGreen union catalog.
Seeding the search engines
Even larger businesses loom on the fringes of the traditional database and information content fields. Many respondents to this year's database marketplace survey voiced growing concerns with Google Scholar and Microsoft Windows Live Academic, free services that threaten to replace traditional journal indexes. Google Books and Wikipedia gained share from millions of book users.
Traditional information companies worry how libraries can continue to justify the expense of their products and services in the face of growing (and highly visible) free resources. Cautiously working with the giants is one tactic, as many primary publishers allow at least their indexes to be crawled by the scholarly search engines. The CrossRef pilot project introduced many scientific database producers to being indexed by Google, but humanities publishers, including JSTOR and Project Muse, have also exposed URLs.
Google's purchase of YouTube may have implications for the future information world, with potential for multimedia information content and social networking, though the impending Viacom lawsuit against Google throws up questions about copyrighted material in the Google service. How social technologies of Web 2.0 can be integrated with proprietary content is a challenge that information companies have not yet met, but many respondents to our survey see that as important to their future.
Microsoft tried to make sure that Google isn't the only mega-information business with the announcement of its own competing large-scale book digitization plan (Live Search Books) and Windows Live Academic Search, which competes with Google Scholar. Yahoo has partnered with seven newspaper companies representing 176 papers to share content, advertising, and technology. In the meantime, the American Chemical Society settled its lawsuit with Google over its “Scholar” copyright claim (as in “Google Scholar” and “SciFinder Scholar”).
Organic farming
These massive projects emphasize quantity, not quality, of access to information. Microsoft freely provides images of Google Book scans that show human fingers on the scans and have pages missing. Organic farmers strive to reverse the supersizing trends and provide high-quality, small-scale results. Traditional information industry companies feel their competitive edge must rely on high-quality presentation, indexing, and selection.
BioMed Central's Faculty of 1000 Medicine database relies on authoritative voices to evaluate quality medical literature. Thematic collections, such as the H.W. Wilson Company's Current Issues: Reference Shelf Plus, ProQuest CSA's Civil War Era primary source database, EBSCO's new Reference Centers on topics such as home improvement and small engine repair, and ABC-CLIO's History Reference Online, emphasize quality selection for those who care about taste over massive portions.
Organic farmers face concerns with government regulations and oversight. Mandated moves to open access through institutional or subject repositories and experimental alternative journals continue to concern publishers. The Directory of Open Access Journals now lists over 2500 e-journal titles that are available at no fee to the reader.
OpenDOAR is a directory of open access repositories, and many libraries are launching institutional repositories. The U.S. National Institutes of Health recommends optional self-archiving within a year of publication, and the European Commission recently published a report advocating open access. Publishers at the subsequent meeting in Brussels expressed concerns that some open access alternatives threaten scholarly publishing in the “Brussels Declaration on STM Publishing”.
From another perspective, the University of California Libraries announced it is advocating value-based journal prices, showing it is willing to pay more for better produce but less for things that don't get touched.
Planting more and better yield
Bigger farms mean bigger crops, but even smaller ones feel pressure to have higher yields. The desire for more online books puts pressure on both libraries and publishers. ProQuest CSA added ProQuest and EBSCO full text to CSA bibliographic databases in sociology, economics, business, and political science. Springer, Elsevier, and Wiley introduced new ebook collections, while existing ebook collections grew in titles and availability.
A new ebook ordering platform from ebrary integrates ebook ordering through book vendors YBP and Blackwell. But once again, Google set the bar extremely high, with more library collections being digitized for Google Book Search along with its publicized goal to digitize everything. Several more universities joined the Book Search project, including the University of California, Princeton University, University of Virginia, and University of Texas at Austin, as did international partners like the Bavarian State Library and National Library of Catalonia.
In the meantime, R.R. Bowker's Index Content Enrichment aims to provide better access to the books and other materials in our library catalogs, allowing users to search tables of contents and fiction profiles. The Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) in the UK funded a project led by Emerald to develop an RSS news feed to push e-journal information into library catalogs.
Many database providers followed the trend toward digitizing everything by expanding collections and adding new historical collections. Ingenta and Factiva both passed the 10,000 e-publications mark; NewsBank/Readex's America's Historical Newspapers Collection reached nine million facsimile pages of over 1300 papers; ProQuest introduced many new historical collections, including Historical Annual Reports, Obituaries, and the Wellesley Index to Victorian Periodicals; and Opinion Archives added complete runs of notable journals, including The Nation, The New Republic, and National Review. Almost all e-journals and ebooks collections continued to expand in years of coverage and/or number of sources.
Digging deeper
New or expanded offerings go beyond books and journals, with 100,000 images added to ARTstor's Digital Library and new Music and Art portals from Oxford University Press (OUP). New collections allow deep access to previously hard-to-reach materials, such as E-Enlightenment from OUP, which provides online access to 75,000 letters from 18th-century thinkers and authors; historical American Broadsides and Ephemera from Readex and the American Antiquarian Society; and streamed video of theater productions and film adaptations through Alexander Street Press's Theatre in Video. ProQuest CSA Illustrata extracts and indexes tables and figures from scholarly journal articles while retaining the indexing and context of whole articles.
Farming implements and tools
Whether they be horse-drawn plow and sickle or a modern tractor and combine, good tools are required by farmers to keep up with the work. It got easier to make sense of the masses of usage data generated by e-collections with some new tools this year. Paratext added an interactive usage statistics model for its Reference Universe customers that lets libraries view and analyze usage data and terms searched by their users. MPS Technologies' Scholarly Stats provides customized usage reports for libraries that integrate separate vendor reports. Usage data analysis got even more sophisticated with Thomson Scientific's Journal Use Reports, which integrates library journal usage data with quality metrics for journals with ISI Journal Citation Reports and for articles with Web of Science® citations.
Some new tools this year stand out as first steps that will move database farming tools into power tools. Browsealoud technology speaks Facts On File News Service web database content to those who need it, while Lextrix from Cambridge University Press helps students read Greek and Latin texts. The WorldBank e-Library interface has improved charting options and allows users to map indicators, including zooming and panning. Linking remains a primary way to get publishers' content to users, no matter where they begin their work. Linking tools such as Ingenta's appropriate copy linking in Google Scholar, ProQuest's One Click, and CrossRef's DOI harvesting product are key.
The future
Can the family database farm survive next to the giant data-businesses? Even the largest companies in the database marketplace are feeling pressure from Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft. We heard many worries from database providers [see the forthcoming Online Databases column, LJ 6/1/07], but information companies are differentiating their products by emphasizing quality, selection, and specialized tools. They are working on ways to integrate social networks, provide increased depth within their specialties, and make their products stand out. Better taste and better quality, combined with new and better harvesting products, just may be what it takes to succeed on the information farms of the future.
| ORGANIZATION NAME | SIGNATURE PROJECT | PRIMARY LIBRARY MARKET | NEW AQUISITION | PRIMARY SUBJECT | PERCENTAGE OF FULL-TEXT CONTENT | MOST HEAVILY USED PRICING OPTIONS | CONTENT TYPES | 2007 NEW PRODUCT? | PERCENTAGE OF SERVICE TO NEW LIBRARIES |
| AARP | AgeLine® | Academic | No | Social sciences | No response | Concurrent user, flat fee subscription | Bibliographic databases, directories | Yes | >75 |
| ABC-CLIO | Historical Abstracts, America: History & Life | Academic | Yes | Social sciences | >75 | Concurrent user, flat fee subscription | Bibliographic databases, other | Yes | >75 |
| Alexander Street Press | Women and Social Movements: Scholar's Edition | Academic | Yes | Arts & humanities | >75 | No response | Bibliographic databases, fact/reference books, other | Yes | >75 |
| American Chemical Society, Publications Division | Journals including Journal of the American Chemical Society | Academic | No | Other sciences & engineering | >75 | Flat fee subscription | Fact/reference books and periodicals, other | Yes | >75 |
| American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) | ACLS Humanities E-Book Collection (formerly ACLS History E-Book Project) | Academic | Yes | Arts & humanities | >75 | Flat fee subscription | Full-text other (full-text books) | Yes | >75 |
| American Psychiatric Publishing | www.PsychiatryOnline.com | Academic | Yes | Life sciences–medicine | >75 | Connect time, concurrent user subscription | Bibliographic databases, fact/reference, other | No | >75 |
| ARTstor | ARTstor Digital Library | Academic | Yes | Arts & humanities | No response | Flat fee subscription | Other (digital images and associated metadata) | Yes | >75 |
| Books24X7 | ITPro | Academic | Yes | Other sciences & engineering | >75 | Concurrent user, other (site license, unlimited concurrent users) | Full-text other | Yes | >75 |
| R.R. Bowker | BooksInPrint.com | Public | Yes | General interest | Flat fee subscription | Bibliographic databases, OPAC additions | Yes | >75 | |
| CABI | CAB Abstracts | Special | Yes | Other sciences & engineering | <25 | Concurrent user | Bibliographic databases, encyclopedias, other | Yes | >75 |
| Carroll Publishing | GovSearch Suite | Public | Yes | Social sciences | >75 | Flat fee subscription | Directories, statistical/numeric databases | No | >75 |
| Chemical Abstracts Service (CAS) | The CAS Chemical Registry System and Database | Special | No | Life sciences–medicine | No response | No response | Bibliographic and statistical/numeric databases | Yes | No response |
| Columbia University Press | Columbia Granger's World of Poetry | Academic | No | Arts & humanities | >75 | Flat fee subscription | Fact/reference books | No response | >75 |
| CQ | CQ Press Political Reference Suite of Online Editions | Academic | No | News | >75 | Potential user subscription | Bibliographic databases, directories, other | Yes | >75 |
| ebrary | The ebrary platform | Academic | Yes | Business–Economics | >75 | Concurrent user subscription, other (FTE-based pricing for subscriptions; price based on list for purchased titles) | Directories, encyclopedias, fact/reference books, other | Yes | >75 |
| EBSCO Publishing | Business Source Complete Academic Search Complete | Academic | Yes | Business–Economics | 51–75 | Flat fee subscription | Bibliographic databases, directories, other | Yes | >75 |
| Emerald | Emerald Management Xtra | Academic | Yes | Business–Economics | >75 | Concurrent user, flat fee subscription | Full-text periodicals, case studies, other | Yes | 50–74 |
| Encyclopedia Britannica | Britannica Online Public Library Edition | Academic | No | General interest | >75 | Other (price based on institution type & enrollment; enrollment below certain thresholds charged flat fee) | Encyclopedias, reference books, full-text periodicals | Yes | 50–74 |
| Factiva, from Dow Jones | Factiva.com | Special | Yes | News | >75 | Flat fee subscription | Bibliographic databases, directories, other | No | 50–74 |
| Facts On File | Six cross-searchable history databases | School | No | Social sciences | >75 | Other (full-time enrollment for schools; number of cardholders for public) | Encyclopedias, fact/reference books, other | Yes | >75 |
| Greenwood | Daily Life Online family of products | Public | No | Arts & humanities | >75 | Potential user subscription | Encyclopedias, fact/reference books, other | Yes | >75 |
| IGI Global (formerly Idea Group, Inc.) | InfoSci-Online Premium | School | No response | Other sciences & engineering | >75 | Potential user, flat fee subscription, fee per record | Encyclopedias, fact/reference books, periodicals, other | Yes | >75 |
| InfoUSA | ReferenceUSA; US Business Model | Public | No | Business–Economics | <25 | Flat fee subscription | Directories | Yes | >75 |
| Ingenta | IngentaConnect | Academic | No | Life sciences–medicine | >75 | Other (no charge to libraries from Ingenta; charge to libraries from publisher) | Encyclopedias, fact/reference books, periodicals | Yes | >75 |
| InteLex | N/A | Academic | No | Arts & humanities | >75 | Other (one-time purchase with web access for annual fee) | Full-text periodicals, full-text collected works, other | Yes | >75 |
| Marshall Cavendish | “Cultures of the World” series | School | No | Social sciences | >75 | Concurrent user, potential user subscription | Encyclopedias, fact/reference books | Yes | >75 |
| OECD | SourceOECD | Academic | No | Business–Economics | >75 | Flat fee subscription | Fact/reference books, full-text periodicals, full-text other | Yes | 50–74 |
| OpinionArchives | N/A | Academic | Yes | Arts & humanities | >75 | Concurrent user, flat fee subscription, other | Bibliographic databases, full-text periodicals | Yes | >75 |
| Ovid Technologies | Ovid Web Gateway/Journals@Ovid | Academic | Yes | Life sciences–medicine | 26–50 | Concurrent user subscripton | Bibliographic databases, fact/reference, other | Yes | >75 |
| Oxford University Press | Oxford English Dictionary Online | Public | Yes | Arts & humanities | >75 | Concurrent user, potential user subscription | Encyclopedias, fact/reference books | Yes | 50–74 |
| Project MUSE | Project MUSE | Academic | Yes | Arts & humanities | >75 | Flat fee subscription | Full-text periodicals | No | >75 |
| ProQuest CSA | ProQuest: ProQuest Historical Newspapers™; CSA: CSA Illustrata | Academic | Yes | Business–Economics | >75 | Flat fee subscription | Bibliographic databases, encyclopedias, full-text other | Yes | >75 |
| Readex, a division of NewsBank | Archive of Americana | Academic | No | Social sciences | No response | No response | Other (historical collections of primary source materials) | Yes | >75 |
| Rosen Publishing | Teen Health & Wellness: Real Life, Real Answers | School | No | Multidisciplinary | >75 | Flat fee subscription | Other | To be determined | >75 |
| Rotunda | Papers of George Washington Digital Edition | Academic | No | Social sciences | >75 | Flat fee subscription | Other (transcripts of primary-source materials) | Yes | >75 |
| Snapdata® | Snapshots Series | Special | No | Business–Economics | <25 | Concurrent user, potential user, flat fee subscription, fee per record or record part | Statistical/numeric databases | No | >75 |
| Springer | SpringerLink | Academic | Yes | Life sciences–medicine | >75 | No response | Bibliographic databases, encyclopedias, other | Yes | >75 |
| Thomson Scientific | Web of Science® | Academic | Yes | Multidisciplinary | <25 | Flat fee subscription | Bibliographic databases, other | Yes | 26–49 |
| H.W. Wilson | Reader's Guide to Periodical Literature | Academic | No | Multidisciplinary | 51–75 | Concurrent user, potential user, flat fee subscription | Bibliographic databases, other | Yes | >75 |
| World Bank | World Bank e-Library | Academic | No | Business–Economics | 26–50 | Other (fee per FTE/number of authorized users) | Fact/reference books, other | Yes | >75 |
| World Book | World Book Online Reference Center | School | No | Multidisciplinary | >75 | Connect time, concurrent user, potential user, flat fee subscription | Encyclopedias, fact/reference books, other | Yes | >75 |
| Xrefer | Xreferplus Ready-Reference | Academic | Yes | Social sciences | >75 | Potential user subscription | Encyclopedias, fact/reference books, other | Yes | >75 |
| SOURCE: LJ Database Marketplace Survey 2007. NOTE: Organizations listed responded to a detailed survey | |||||||||
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| Author Information |
| Carol Tenopir (ctenopir@utk.edu) is Professor, School of Information Sciences, University of Tennessee (UTK), Knoxville, and LJ's Online Databases columnist; Gayle Baker (gsbaker@utk.edu) is Electronic Services Coordinator, UTK Libra |