Database Marketplace 2008: Information With A Twist
Vendors keep the party going with Web 2.0
By Carol Tenopir, Gayle Baker, & Jill E. Grogg -- Library Journal, 5/15/2008
Social networking and other Web 2.0 technologies led the social whirl of the information industry. Publishers and librarians tried to keep their products and services relevant by mixing authoritative content with user involvement, but that wasn't enough. Enhancing interfaces, adding new forms of content, and making strategic acquisitions—all are necessary to ensure that the information industry party continues.
The gang's all here
Wikipedia and Wikia remain leaders in social participation, with user content and editing coming from all over the world. Automatic flags on content that may be biased or that needs additional citations offer warnings to Wikipedia users. Traditional databases are learning to include user participation without abnegating quality control.
Many notable user participation projects are being launched in 2008. Elsevier is testing two social networking initiatives: “2collab” to support scientific collaboration and information filtering, plus “Scirus Topic Pages” to facilitate scholarly discussion on specialized topics. Readex (a division of NewsBank) introduced “Crossroads” to let researchers share comments on the materials in its digital collections.
Nanotechnology researchers can meet and interact via “ACS Nanotation,” a web space within the new journal ACS Nano. Taylor & Francis added “NanoScienceWorks.org,” a free community portal for nanoscience researchers that enhances the NANOnetBASE database.Thomson Scientific's journal citation forum "Citation Impact Forum" provides a place to discuss citation research methods.
In a similar vein, ACS (American Chemical Society) added alerting services via email or RSS feeds, while OCLC's “WorldCat Local” mixes local library holding information with bibliographic searching, and CrossRef's new citation look-up plug-in will let bloggers verify and insert citations with their Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs®).
Remaining relevant in a new web world may mean being willing to explore new business models. The New York Times abandoned the “TimesSelect” subscription option in favor of free online access, while the Financial Times began charging web users based on how many articles they view (with up to 30 free articles per month).
IEEE (Institute of Electrical & Electronics Engineers) retains its subscription model but will provide free access to articles on high-energy physics. Dow Jones Factiva added new features at no extra charge, including a “Newsletter Builder” wizard. BioMed Central journals are open access, while its new subscription-based “Biology Image Library” provides a collection of royalty-free medical images for downloading and use. Thomson Healthcare's “PDRhealth.com” is free to consumers.
Debutantes & dressing up
Welcoming new librarians to the party is a good strategy for remaining visible and relevant in the future. CAS added a library school training program for its STN service, joining Thomson Scientific's venerable Dialog training program and similar programs offered by Factiva, LexisNexis, Westlaw, OCLC, and others.
By offering free access to LIS students for training and practice, along with training materials and personal instructional assistance, these online services are working to assure that the new generation of power searchers will feel comfortable with their services. ProQuest extended its library school internship program, choosing LIS student interns who are responsible for ProQuest training sessions at their host institutions.
New interfaces help information systems dress up their content. EBSCOhost, LexisNexis, Elsevier's Scopus and ScienceDirect, AIP's (American Institute of Physics) Scitation, Knovel, Web of Knowledge, Questel-Orbit, and others redesigned or significantly enhanced their interfaces. The new OvidSP interface combines functions of the current Ovid and SilverPlatter interfaces but also adds new features and will eventually replace them both.
ABC-CLIO's new product for school libraries offers a common interface for all of its databases, with a feature that helps students analyze issues from a variety of viewpoints. JSTOR added links to cited references for those journals that are in the JSTOR collection and is adding links to references cited in journals that are outside the JSTOR collection.
Thomson Scientific will use the “Knowledge Dashboard” from Collexis to build a data mining tool for Web of Knowledge. Credo Reference (formerly Xrefer) added Harvard University Press titles to its integrated reference service.
Multimedia content is dressing up many products, too. Dance in Video and Opera in Video, from Alexander Street Press, mix streaming video with text and indexing. Facts On File purchased Films Media Group, enabling it to add video content to the history databases. Naxos Music Library uses streaming audio for music and audiobooks. And World Book Advanced mixes multimedia files with World Book content, news reports from Reuters, and books and journals. Factiva's “Listen to Article” feature converts text to speech on the fly, and another Factiva product offers video and audio news and interviews.
Books star
Ebooks played a starring role in many libraries, as ebook collections continued to grow. EBSCO added Elsevier's ebook collection to its partnerships. OCLC's netLibrary reached a deal with Oxford University Press to sell Oxford Scholarship Online books. Ovid's Wolters Kluwer Health will offer Springer's medical and health sciences titles. And Brill Academic Publisher's scientific titles are now part of Knovel's collection.
Ebook functions improved as netLibrary added audiobooks. The Ebook Library (EBL) platform from Ebook Corp. sells individual chapters and added simultaneous user access for single book titles. ebrary is beta testing a Java-based reader, and Cambridge University Press announced it will use the EBL platform for its new “Cambridge Ebook Collection.”
Planning tools
Software to help librarians manage e-resources improves planning and budget decisions. OCLC's ContentDM and ebrary's InfoTools are software packages for managing all aspects of digital collections, while the Ulrichs' Serials Analysis System helps librarians make decisions about their serials services. ProQuest's Serials Solutions 360 COUNTER aggregates COUNTER-compliant usage reports with final documents that incorporate cost data and cross-vendor comparisons. The usage statistics market remained competitive as Swets acquired ScholarlyStats.
EBSCO's NoveList K–8 Plus gives school librarians and students readers' advisory (RA) support; the recently launched NoveList Plus for all libraries adds nonfiction RA to NoveList. The Non-Fiction Connection from R.R. Bowker joins the company's RA tool, Fiction Connection, to help public and school librarians and patrons.
Standards are an essential ingredient to making analysis tools effective, including compliance with the COUNTER and SUSHI (Standardized Usage Statistics Harvesting Initiative) standards, so librarians welcomed JSTOR's joining the majority of publishers who supply COUNTER-compliant usage statistics.
The National Information Standards Organization (NISO) also issued a document on Shared E-Resource Understanding (SERU) to promote knowledge for publishers and librarians related to e-resources' licensing agreements.
Everyone is welcome
Content in multiple languages and information from around the world help make database products more accessible. Readex and ProQuest each added collections of Spanish-language newspapers; Chemical Abstracts increased its coverage of patents from China, India, Korea, and Europe; and Encyclopaedia Britannica added Spanish-language reference tools.
New languages will be added to Oxford's Language Dictionaries, with audio files to aid in pronunciation. English-language multicultural additions include Oxford Islamic Studies Online and Greenwood's “Experience” products, including African American Experience and Latino American Experience.
Longevity demonstrates the continued importance of information companies that combine high-quality information content with the finding and relevance judging aids provided by indexing and abstracting. Chemical Abstracts Service celebrated its 100th birthday in 2007, H.W. Wilson beats that by almost a decade, Emerald turned 40, and the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI) turned 60.
Digitizing new collections or expanding existing ones remains a high priority, with growing expectations from users that everything from Volume 1, Number 1, will be available. Emerald and Nature both achieved this goal in 2007; Brill Academic Publishers will make its back files available later in 2008. Citations going back to 1949 were added to the OLDMEDLINE subset of PubMed, and H.W. Wilson introduced additional retrospective indexes such as Applied Science & Technology Index Retrospective.
Readex will add more historical newspapers. Adam Matthew, Alexander Street Press, ARTstor, Rotunda, CQ Press, Cengage Learning (formerly Thomson Gale), and others continue to digitize and put together collections on a variety of historical and special topics.
New dance partners
Some notable mergers and acquisitions went smoothly. The transition of Thomson Gale to Cengage Learning was mostly seamless for customers. ProQuest and CSA merged into the new ProQuest and came out quickly with products featuring CSA's databases linked to ProQuest's collections of full-text journals. ProQuest's subsequent purchase of WebFeat to merge with its Serials Solutions unit will consolidate federated search software.
OCLC continued strategic acquisitions, notably the EZproxy software to authenticate remote users. EBSCO will now produce the ABC-CLIO history databases, and Springer acquired life sciences laboratory protocols from Humana Publishing, which will be called Springer Protocols.
While it proceeded without apparent glitches, the Wiley Blackwell merger raised more concerns among librarians and scholarly publishers, as scholarly publishing continues to consolidate. Some librarians also worry that the Taylor & Francis acquisition of Haworth Press might eventually increase the cost of library science publications.
It is too early to tell the impact on libraries, if any, when Reed Elsevier, parent company of LexisNexis, completes its purchase of the risk assessment company ChoicePoint for over $4 billion. At the same time the company plans to sell Reed Business Information (which includes Library Journal) and recently sold 500 social sciences series/serials/books to Emerald Group. Meanwhile, the Thomson-Reuters merger is progressing, with neither U.S. nor European courts offering objections.
Prepackaged to go
Prepackaged searches or search widgets can help novice searchers conduct more effective searches. AARP's Searches To Go is predefined searches for researchers or consumers on topics related to aging. ProQuest Search Widget Creator helps librarians create customized search widgets to be put on the library web page. After clicking on the widget, the user must enter search terms but is offered suggestions of prebuilt search combinations.
Accessing information through a cell phone, iPod, or PDA brings high-quality information to go. American Psychiatric Publishing's medical books and Encyclopaedia Britannica can now be accessed on mobile devices. Factiva Mobile provides a three-month supply of news services formatted for mobile devices.
Although information companies continue to worry about competition from free search engines and user-generated services, many are adapting or fighting back by expanding content and features to make their products stand above the competition. In a year when Newsweek highlighted “The Revenge of the Experts” (www.newsweek.com/id/119091/output/print), authoritative high-quality information enhanced with multimedia content, mobile access, social collaboration, and prepackaged searches all made this year's information industry party on.
| Organization Name | % of Service to Libraries | Primary Library Market | New Acquisition or Partnership | Signature Product | 2008 New Product? | Content Types | Primary Subject | Most Heavily Used Pricing Options |
| AARP | >75 | Academic | No | AgeLine Database | No | Bibliographic databases, full-text other | Multidisciplinary | Flat fee subscription |
| Adam Matthew Digital | >75 | Academic | No | Slavery, Abolition, and Social Justice, 1490–2007 | Yes | Full-text periodicals, full-text newspapers/other news sources | Arts & humanities | Potential user, flat fee subscription, other (discount levels based on internal banding structure influenced by 2005 Carnegie Classification and JISC-UK) |
| American Chemical Society, Publications Division | >75 | Academic | Yes | Journal content | Yes | Fact/reference books, full-text periodicals | Other sciences & engineering | Flat fee subscription |
| American Council of Learned Societies | >75 | Academic | Yes | ACLS Humanities E-Book | Yes | Full-text other (full-text scholarly monographs) | Arts & humanities | Flat fee subscription |
| Arcitext.com | 50–74 | Academic | No | Daily Mirror archive, 1903–present day | Yes | Full-text newspapers/other news sources | News | Flat fee subscription, other (public: population served; higher ed: JISC banding by number of students; schools: number of pupils; also single-user access) |
| Berkeley Electronic Press | >75 | Academic | Yes | ResearchNow Full Access | Yes | Full-text periodicals, full-text other | Business-Economics | Flat fee subscription |
| Books24X7 | >75 | Academic | Yes | Bundled subscription of ITPro, EngineeringPro, and BusinessPro | Yes | Fact/reference books, other | Other sciences & engineering | Concurrent user subscription, other (site license with unlimited concurrent users, no access denials) |
| R.R. Bowker | 50–74 | Academic | Yes | BooksInPrint.com | Yes | Bibliographic databases, directories, encyclopedias, fact/reference books, other | General interest | Concurrent user subscription, other (subscription-based, on size of library) |
| Brill | >75 | Academic | Yes | Brill Online | Yes | Bibliographic databases, directories, encyclopedias, full-text periodicals, other | Arts & humanities | Concurrent user, flat fee subscription, other (outright purchase/annual subscription) |
| Cengage Learning | >75 | School | Yes | Literature Criticism Online, Literature Resource Center, Dictionary of Literary Biography | Yes | Directories, encyclopedias, fact/reference books, full-text periodicals, other | Arts & humanities | Potential user subscription |
| Chemical Abstracts Service (CAS) | No response | Special | No | The CAS Registry Database | Yes | Bibliographic databases, statistical/numeric databases, other | Life sciences-medicine | Concurrent user, flat fee subscription |
| Columbia University Press | >75 | Academic | Yes | Columbia Granger's World of Poetry | Yes | Fact/reference books, full-text other | Arts & humanities | Concurrent user, potential user subscription |
| Credo (formerly Xrefer) | >75 | Academic | Yes | Credo Reference | Yes | Encyclopedias, fact/reference books, other | Multidisciplinary | Flat fee subscription |
| Walter de Gruyter, Inc. | >75 | School | No | The Atlas of North American English, World Guide to Libraries | Yes | Bibliographic databases, directories, encyclopedias, fact/reference books, full-text periodicals | Other sciences & engineering | No response |
| ebrary | >75 | Academic | Yes | The ebrary platform | Yes | Directories, encyclopedias, fact/reference books, full-text periodicals, full-text other, other | Multidisciplinary | Concurrent user subscription, other (FTE-based pricing for subscriptions; price based on list for purchased titles; annual licensing fee for platform) |
| EBSCO Publishing | >75 | Academic | Yes | Business Source and Academic Search line of products | Yes | Bibliographic databases, directories, encyclopedias, fact/reference books, full-text periodicals, full-text newspapers/other news sources, other | Business-Economics | Flat fee subscription |
| Elsevier | >75 | Academic | No | Engineering Village | Yes | Bibliographic databases, full-text other, other | Other sciences & engineering | No response |
| Facts On File | >75 | School | No | Science Online | Yes | Encyclopedias, fact/reference books, full text newspapers/other news sources, other | Social sciences | Other (FTE for schools, cardholders for public, all prices include unlimited usage and remote access) |
| Greenwood Press | >75 | Public | Yes | Daily Life Online family of products | Yes | Encyclopedias, fact/reference books, full-text other | General interest | Potential user subscription |
| Ingenta | >75 | School | Yes | IngentaConnect | Yes | Fact/reference books, full-text periodicals | Arts & humanities | Other (Basic service free to libraries; full text access by subscription and pay per view; charged-for upgrades available to enhance site's functionality) |
| JSTOR | >75 | Academic | No | 14 separate collections of e-journals, multidisciplinary and discipline-specific | Yes | Bibliographic databases, full-text periodicals, full-text other, other | Arts & humanities | Flat fee subscription |
| Knovel Corporation | 26–49 | Special | Yes | Knovel—online technical reference collection | Yes | Fact/reference books, full-text other, statistical/numeric databases | Other sciences & engineering | Concurrent user subscription |
| LexisNexis Academic & Library Solutions | >75 | Academic | No | LexisNexis Academic | Yes | Bibliographic databases, full-text periodicals, full-text newspapers/other news sources, statistical/numeric databases, other) | Social sciences | Flat fee subscription |
| McGraw-Hill Professional | >75 | Academic | No | AccessMedicine | Yes | Encyclopedias, fact/reference books, other | Life sciences-medicine | Concurrent user subscription |
| Marquis Who's Who | 50–74 | Public | Yes | Who's Who in America | No | Bibliographic databases | Other sciences & engineering | Potential user, flat fee subscription |
| Organisation for Economic Co-operation & Development (OECD) | >75 | Academic | No | SourceOECD | Yes | Fact/reference books, full-text periodicals, full-text other, statistical/numeric databases | Business-Economics | Concurrent user, flat fee subscription |
| Oxford University Press | >75 | Academic | Yes | Oxford English Dictionary—in print and online | Yes | Encyclopedias, fact/reference books, full-text other | Arts & humanities | Concurrent user, potential user, flat fee subscription |
| Praeger Security International (owned by Greenwood Press) | >75 | Academic | Yes | Praeger Security International Online | No | Bibliographic databases, encyclopedias, fact/reference books, full-text periodicals, full-text other, other | Social sciences | Potential user subscription |
| Project MUSE | >75 | Academic | Yes | Project MUSE | No | full-text periodicals | Arts & humanities | Flat fee subscription, other (North America academic based on Carnegie Class and historical usage; International based on Country Income Class and academic programming; public based on population served) |
| ProQuest | >75 | Academic | Yes | ABI/Inform, Early English Books Online, | Yes | Bibliographic databases, encyclopedias, full-text periodicals, full-text newspapers/other news sources | Business-Economics | Flat fee subscription |
| Rittenhouse Book Distributors | >75 | Academic | Yes | R2 Digital Library | Yes | Encyclopedias, fact/reference books, full-text other, other | Life sciences-medicine | Other (concurrent user at the individual resource/title level, outright purchase for life of the edition) |
| Rosen Publishing | >75 | School | No | Teen Health & Wellness: Real Life, Real Answers | No | Other | General interest | Flat fee subscription |
| SAGE | >75 | Academic | No | SAGE eReference | No | Reference books | Social sciences | Purchase to own |
| Snapdata International | >75 | Special | No | Snapshots Series | No | Statistical/numeric databases | Business-Economics | Concurrent user, flat fee subscription, fee per record or record part |
| Springer | >75 | Academic | Yes | Selected important titles: Lecture Notes in Computer Science (book series); Theoretical and Applied Genetics, Human Genetics, and Diabetologia (journals) | Yes | Bibliographic databases, encyclopedias, fact/reference books, full-text periodicals, full-text other, other | Life sciences-medicine | No response |
| Taylor & Francis Books | >75 | Academic | Yes | informaworld, online platform | Yes | Bibliographic databases, directories, encyclopedias, fact/reference books, full text periodicals, statistical/numeric databases | Social sciences | Concurrent user, potential user subscription |
| University of California Press, Journals & Digital Publishing Div. | >75 | Academic | No | Caliber, online hosting platform for UC Press journals | Yes | full-text periodicals | Arts & humanities | Flat fee subscription, other (pay per view article downloads) |
| Wiley-Blackwell | >75 | Academic | Yes | Combination of Blackwell Synergy and Wiley InterScience | Yes | Directories, encyclopedias, fact/reference books, full-text periodicals, full-text other, statistical/numeric databases, other | Other sciences & engineering | Concurrent user, potential user subscription, fee per record or record part |
| H.W. Wilson | >75 | Academic | Yes | Reader's Guide to Periodical Literature | Yes | Bibliographic databases, fact/reference books, full-text periodicals, full-text other | Arts & humanities | Concurrent user, flat fee subscription |
| SOURCE: LJ Database Marketplace Survey 2008. NOTE: Organizations listed responded to a detailed survey | ||||||||
| 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 Libraries; and Jill E. Grogg (jgrogg@bama.ua.edu), a 2007 LJ Mover & Shaker, is Electronic Resources Librarian, University of Alabama Libraries, Tuscaloosa |
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