Betrayed By Britannica? by David A. Tyckoson (Head of Reference, Henry Madden Library,. California State University â Fresno) .
C OMPARATIVE
ADVISOR REVIEWS
Advisor Op Ed
CatchWord & ingentaJournals: Comparative Review CatchWord Composite Score: ingenta Composite Score:
★★★★ ★★★★
Reviewed by: K. Mulliner (Collection Development Coordinator, Ohio University Libraries, Athens, Ohio 45701-2978) Date of Review: 3/6/00
CatchWord Pricing Options
From a library or user perspective, CatchWord is free. That means that the cost of the service is paid by publishers rather than subscribing libraries. As operated in February 2000, subscribers to a print journal receive access to an electronic version. Some publishers (such as Plenum) may have a surcharge, paid to the publisher for the electronic edition. For articles not covered by an institutional subscription, online document delivery service based on credit card payment is available.
Product Description Formed as a private-sector company in 1995 by Simon Inger and Peter Trevellick, CatchWord has been a pioneer in publishersupported aggregation. CatchWord’s Research Journals is one of three services offered from the CatchWord site and the focus of this review. Business Journals is primarily a defined subset of Research Journals, focusing on those titles of interest to businesses (omitting more specialized research titles). Now buried in secondary pages, sheet music has been a CatchWord feature. Through special software called MusicPage, sheet music can be printed (but not downloaded) on a fee-per-title basis. Research Journals offers access to the resources of a number of publishers with a common interface and/or a standard way to link to titles from an OPAC. It provides searches of its resources from its site and access through abstracting and indexing (A & I) services. It also offers a fee-based document delivery service for articles to which an institution or individual holds no valid subscription. As a comparison, a test article through Research Journals cost $23.50 compared to $29 through UnCover,
6 The Charleston Advisor / April 2000
What Were They Thinking? Betrayed By Britannica?
“Free” Access to E-Journals: CatchWord and ingenta Overview Yes, there is no such thing as free lunch and comparatively few free e-journals. But many journals do offer “free” electronic access for institutions with print subscriptions. Others include a surcharge for access to an electronic edition or have “decoupled” subscriptions; that is, subscriptions to the print and electronic editions are separately priced. Regardless of publisher pricing models, the bottom-line question is, “how does my institution get access to those journals and what will it cost?” In some cases (Cambridge University Press and Wiley Scientific as examples), a publisher may offer access through its own site. Representing a transition is the American Institute of Physics (AIP) which offers its own titles but also serves as an aggregator by hosting titles published by scholarly organizations in related fields. This latter approach, offering a site providing access to titles from many publishers, is termed aggregation. For any institution with substantial numbers of subscriptions, an aggregator can facilitate electronic access by reducing the number of interfaces that its users encounter. Among general aggregators, there are those that impose a surcharge on users and those that place the charge on publishers. Examples of the former include OCLC and Faxon RoweCom’s Information Quest. In the user-pay model, subscribing institutions may pay a fixed price for each title and use-sensitive pricing (i.e., paying for simultaneous users). Such charges are in addition to any surcharges that a publisher may levy for access rights to its electronic editions. Any institution with an unlimited subscription budget may well find this approach attractive. For the rest of us trying to offer print and electronic information sources without breaking the bank, the aggregators depending on publisher payments are the obvious choice. At present, this primarily means two British companies: CatchWord and ingenta. Despite offering much the same kind of access, these companies are not really competitors in the library market for the simple reason that each offers a unique array of publishers. Thus, if one wishes access to a Blackwell journal, one may turn to ingenta, and if one wishes access to a Taylor and Francis journal, one may turn to CatchWord. For this reason, each is reviewed independently. While they may compete to host publishers, from a library’s perspective, they are complementary.
www.charlestonco.com
by David A. Tyckoson (Head of Reference, Henry Madden Library, California State University – Fresno) Over the last six months, the management of Encyclopedia Britannica made several decisions that surprised the information world. Well, maybe not the entire information world, but they certainly gave me (and many other reference librarians) a couple of big shocks. First, there were rumors that no new print edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica would ever be published. Next, they opened a new public Website offering “free” access to the electronic version of the encyclopedia. Then, they decided to support that new Website by selling advertising. Finally, they decided to bribe us into using that Website by offering to make a charitable donation for every use of the site. As a librarian, my initial emotional response to all of this news was a sense bewilderment and betrayal. I was bewildered as to why a publisher would eliminate two known revenue streams (print purchases and electronic subscriptions) in favor of an entirely new funding mechanism (advertising). I also felt betrayed in that Britannica had somehow sold the soul of the product in the name of crass commercialism. That this was done by Britannica, one of the oldest and most respected reference publishers, only added to my confusion. Had it been Gale or Reed or someother mega-publisher, I might not have been so surprised, but this was Britannica! What were they thinking? Probably a more important question to ask is “What was I thinking?” The Britannica situation is a microcosm of the changes in our profession and in our society. We may not always approve of these changes, but we cannot control them and we will have to learn to live with them. Examining my reaction to Britannica has helped me to work through some of the issues that this dramatic and unexpected change brought to the surface.
The Charleston Advisor / April 2000
One reason that this change hit so hard is because the Encyclopedia Britannica has such a long history. After all, Britannica was the very first English language encyclopedia ever to be published. For over 200 years, it has been one of our most respected reference tools. Born in a time of great exploration and discovery, the Britannica quickly became the single starting point for readers wishing to learn about a person, place, or topic. In a sense, the Britannica was our very first reference tool. As the Britannica grew, it gained increasing respect, reaching its scholarly pinnacle with the 11th edition published in 1911. My library (and many of yours as well) still keeps this edition on its reference shelves, along with the current (15th) edition and a replica of the original. No other work in our reference collections has served us so well for so long.
the eighteenth century was dominated by subjects at the beginning of the alphabet. It was simply a business decision — a decision that kept Britannica alive so that it could grow to adequately cover the entire range of human knowledge. Britannica has made several bold business decisions over the years. Most readers do not even know that the Britannica is not British. It was sold to American interests almost 100 years ago and is based in Chicago. Despite its American publisher, it retains the British spelling conventions and point of view. The Britannica still calls the Revolutionary War the “United States War of Independence” and still treats this topic from the losing side. The most recent change, and probably the most annoying to us reference librarians, took place in 1974, when the 15th edition was split into the now infamous Micropedia and Macropedia. Based on the recommendations of Mortimer Adler, this classified approach to organizing information was intended to make the Britannica a better educational tool. All it really did was make the Britannica harder to use, since topics could no longer be found in one simple alphabetical order.
“Britannica has made several bold business decisions over the years.”
While we have projected a scholarly image onto the Encyclopedia Britannica, we need to remember that it is and always has been a commercial product. The recent change in the focus of its marketing is only the latest in a long and sometimes strange chain of business decisions. The very first edition was done on a subscription basis and was funded by advanced payments from purchasers. When the project got behind schedule, the editors rushed the remainder into production in order to minimize costs. If you take a good look at your first edition, you will notice that there are more pages devoted to topics beginning with the letters A-C than to everything from M-Z. In fact, the six pages devoted to “Annuities” provide more information than all of the entries from the end of the alphabet (X-Z). This odd balance is not because
The move to free public Web access is just the latest in this long series of unusual business moves. Economically, this one benefits all of us. Whereas a print set would cost a library almost $2,000 and a subscription to the old Internet Britannica at www.eb.com would cost about $0.50 per head per year (or about $7,500 in my case), the new arrangement requires no direct investment by any library. All we need
www.charlestonco.com 59
Advisor Op Ed
Advisor Introductions
to do is link to .britannica.com and off we go. The content looks to be the same and the technology works most of the time, at least now that the initial public rush has ended. In fact, in some ways they actually pay us to use the site with their charitable donation promotion. This sounds like a win-win situation, so why does it still bother me?
bit about advertising. After all, some of our most useful reference books have had advertising for years and that does not seem to bother us. A few, such as the Thomas Register, Peterson’s college guides, and even Books in Print, are essentially just collections of advertisements for companies, services, or products. Let’s just learn to ignore the advertising in the same way that we do in newspapers, magazines, radio, and television.
“The real question that we should be asking is how the new financial arrangement for Britannica will affect its intellectual content.”
The only remaining factor is all of that advertising. As librarians, most of us take the pure view that we should not offer commercial endorsements on our Web pages. At the same time, many of the products that our patrons already use in our libraries have advertising, from Lexis/Nexis to Yahoo to Amazon.com. In fact, almost everything that we use nowadays on the internet is supported by advertisers. Maybe it’s time for us to relax a little
The real question that we should be asking is how the new financial arrangement for Britannica will affect its intellectual content. Will the editors continue to maintain quality scholarly control or will the information slip into the realm of commercially supported infomercials? The value of a product like Britannica, with
over two centuries of development, will take a fair amount of time to decay even if no additional development takes place. At present it looks as if the editors will continue to uphold past standards, but we will be watching closely for any change in scope or content. Will other publishers take the free public access approach to their products? Britannica has thrown down the gauntlet and has certainly taken a bold stand in the information marketplace. Other encyclopedia publishers must certainly be watching to see how the Britannica move affects their electronic and print sales. I personally can’t imagine Gale, for example, ever offering free access to its resources, no matter how many advertisers they could recruit. But just think about how our budgeting process could change if other standard works became available to all of us at no direct cost. Britannica is either establishing the new standard for product pricing or committing corporate suicide. For their sake, and ours, I hope that it turns out to be the former and not the latter.
A Librarian’s Concerns about CrossRef continued from page 58
various Web platforms, either from the publisher or another intermediary; and there’s still good old-fashioned paper, microform, etc. Will all of these sources be available for a DOIX resolver for MY institution’s various means of access, providing the most elegant connection from the library or user’s perspective? Or will only one of these sources be the “resolver” choice? If the primary GOAL for CrossRef is additional income for publishers, then it’s unlikely to be successful and will represent yet more library purchasing dollars sunk in a wasteland of publisher arrogance. If, for example, CrossRef resolves ONLY the various publisher linking schemes,
charging publishers perhaps on a per resolution or per XK links maintained, there would be little incentive to also include library hook to holdings capabilities that would lead library users to the most cost effective access for an article.
Duplication of Effort As libraries build links (including indexing) to electronic content through Websites and in library OPACS, or use gateway services like CatchWord, IQ, ingenta, OCLC, HighWire, OVID, JSTOR, Project Muse, BioOne, Web of Science, SilverLinker etc., CrossRef may prove not only redundant but so partial as to be unusable. And ultimately libraries will be paying the
In the Press . . . continued from page 56
refinements to the Cambridge Journals Online service are also planned, including reference linking; a revised access
60 The Charleston Advisor / April 2000
system for institutional users; and ecommerce functionality. For more information, contact .
bills for the creation of a service that could end as a failure. I’d much rather be involved in creating a robust service, and in the end see the creation of a successful service rather than an ineffective service. Already some publishers involved seem to be interested in “partial” implementation, such as a drop to homepages of journals or publishers, or even not planning on implementing full functionality (hopefully this is code for pilot rather than any long term goal). This suggests that perhaps we will see linkages created among less useful and even marginal publications rather than critical content. Libraries are, in the end, where the money comes from for paying for this service. Make no mistake, libraries through subscription payments will fund the creation, and then, if individuals don’t “buy,” will continue to pay for its maintenance. Libraries should be involved even in this initial development phase.
www.charlestonco.com
Charleston Advisor Review Components Product Title or Common Trade Name: The official product name. URL: The url of the product. Byline: Name of the reviewer, including contact information. Pricing Options: Pricing options available to subscribers. Score: The composite “score” for each resource is based on four elements—Content, Searchability, Price, and Contract Options. Contact Information: Corporate address, phone, fax, e-mail, and URL.
Product Description: A narrative description of the product and its content. Critical Evaluation: Examination of the strengths and weaknesses of the product. Contract Provisions: Detailed description of the options and features of the contracts offered by the vendor. Authentication: Description of the authentication and security options available to subscribers. References: Citations for other reviews of the product or related materials.
Selected Users (Web Edition Only): A partial list of subscribers to the product. Reader Opinion (Web Edition Only): Opinions gleaned from our Web-based opinion form. Related Reviews and Comments: Usage experiences or opposing views. Updates/New Information: Information regarding new releases of the product. Date of Review: Date of the original Charleston Advisor review of the product. The Charleston Advisor © Copyright 2000
Charleston Advisor Rating Guidelines As a critical evaluation tool for Web-based electronic resources, The Charleston Advisor will use a rating system which will score each product based on four elements: content, searchability, price and contract options/features. A Composite Score averaging these elements will provide an “at a glance” rating which will be prominently displayed near the top of each review. The rating system will be based on a fivestar model (with one star being the lowest and five being the highest). As each of the four elements are rated they should be assigned a ranking with granularity no finer than one-half star (e.g., 3.5 stars). These will then be equally weighted and averaged for an overall Composite Score. It is realized that any ranking system is open to personal opinion and interpretation; however, it is recommended that brief evaluative comments be made following each ranking, especially in cases where a product or service receives less than the highest value in a category. TCA is meant to be a critical evaluation tool—not just a descriptive review of a product. Our reviewers are tough! They take great care in the ranking section of the review since this will be one of the most visible yet controversial components of TCA. The following brief guidelines will help in understanding the ranking process.
The Charleston Advisor / April 2000
Content Special attention is paid to the intended audience for which the product is targeted—does the product meet the intended user needs? The content should be compared with competitive products in the marketplace and any major omissions or special strengths will be factored into the rating.
Searchability The user interface and search engine are evaluated in terms of meeting the intended purposes. Is the product intuitive and easy-to-use? Are advanced searching features available if the product warrants it? Are graphics and other screen design features in keeping with the intent of the product and its audience? Is the search engine reliable and does it provide consistent results? Are there special features, installation requirements, plug-ins or other special software requirements? If so, is the product easy to use or more of a nuisance?
Price The value of the product in relation to its cost must be assessed. A high price alone does not necessarily mean a low ranking, but the product is evaluated in terms of content, user interface and value added features. However, vendors who resell duplicative content in different
“packages,” with enough difference to force libraries into acquiring these different packages, may be marked down. Vendors who are flexible (or inflexible) in their pricing options will be noted.
Contract Options/Features The contract provisions that accompany a service will be viewed in terms of accepted national guidelines (e.g., those adopted by major organizations such as the International Coalition of Library Consortia, Association of Research Libraries, ALA). Factors which might be considered include: definition of acceptable users, archiving provisions (when appropriate), lease/ownership of data, interlibrary loan provisions, redistribution of information provisions, or other peculiar or interesting issues.
Composite Score This overall score will be calculated based on an averaging of the above four elements with equal weighting for each element. The Composite Score has been rounded up to the next highest quarter star when necessary (e.g., 3.625 stars). In the case of Opposing Opinions, an Opposing Composite Score will be calculated, yielding a Combined Composite Score. Not all reviews will have an Opposing Score. The Charleston Advisor © Copyright 2000
www.charlestonco.com 5
