Comments on: EBSCO and ecards and who is setting your library policies?

By: Roland

Roland — Tue, 19 May 2009 21:12:40 +0000

In EBSCO’s defense, I would be very surprised if they (EBSCO) understood that they were negotiating effectively a STATEWIDE license when discussing terms with Boston Public. There are nine regional library networks in Mass, each of which licenses e-resources (including EBSCO databases) for use by patrons of their own member libraries. The list of databases available from each regional network is in most cases a subset of those available remotely through the BPL. If the service population of the Boston Public Library is for purposes of remote database usage interpreted to include the entire Commonwealth of Massachusetts, then the most efficient way to work this is for the BPL to license as such and the regional networks should drop their duplicative subscriptions and use those savings to pick up the additional burden the BPL is carrying.

I also agree—this is a bone-headed PR move on the part of EBSCO.

By: Brian Herzog

Brian Herzog — Tue, 12 May 2009 03:55:59 +0000

@Rachel: you’re right, it is a limited time offer – however, a free chicken dinner is still a free chicken dinner, especially if it helps someone find a job. However, I talked with an ebsco sales rep at the Massachusetts Library Conference last week, and she said ebsco was overwhelmed with librarians responding to their free offer, and were backed up by a week or so in responding to inquiries. So there’s another example of poor planning and underestimating response.

But to their credit, ebsco is telling us up front that it’ll be free until the end of the year, then 50% off for the first year – libraries can plan accordingly, or prepare patrons for the cut-off after the free period. Open intentions are good – telling us in November or December would have been bad.

By: Rachael

Rachael — Mon, 11 May 2009 17:12:47 +0000

Brian,

Personally, I wouldn’t consider the Career Library situation an instance of “opening up.” It’s only free for the rest of the year – then you have to start paying. More savvy marketing than social responsibility.

Rachael

By: Suzy

Suzy — Thu, 07 May 2009 11:56:24 +0000

interesting… it appears that Gale is not imposing the same restriction.

By: Lis

Lis — Tue, 05 May 2009 01:30:13 +0000

Looks like you’re getting trackback spam on this entry.
Any way to delete them?

By: Brian Herzog

Brian Herzog — Sat, 02 May 2009 01:52:32 +0000

This is ironic: earlier this week I got an email from EBSCO saying they are offering their Career Library database free to any public library that wants it (due to more people looking for jobs in this tough economy). Odd how they crack down in one area while opening up in another.

I don’t think EBSCO is preparing for a Rosetta-style bait-and-switch by circling the wagons before they go direct to the consumer market. I think they are just legitimately defending their contracts (in much the same way that companies must defend their trademarked brand names, or else lose the trademark on them: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genericized_trademark).

For a business, this makes perfect sense – honestly, I was always a little astonished that BPL could get away with what they were doing. But as a librarian, I will be very sad if ecards were to go away, because it is definitely a step backwards. Especially in MA, where, as Michael points out, every MA resident is entitled to use BPL resources – and not having to drive into Boston makes that a whole lot more realistic.

By: johnofjack

johnofjack — Fri, 01 May 2009 18:27:24 +0000

Ah, thanks, Mike. Now I see why EBSCO cares about this.

And eli: at my library, at least, there is plenty of ill will towards Rosetta for dropping all licensing to libraries.

By: Michael

Michael — Fri, 01 May 2009 17:55:12 +0000

@LK,

I’m pretty sure the BPL doesn’t consider every dishonest person who walks in with a forged electric bill to be part of their service population, either. The alternatives are to increase the burden of proof (to what level?) or cut off access.

And you’re ignoring the larger point. EBSCO isn’t just complaining that people *outside* of Massachusetts are getting eCards. They’re complaining that people *inside* Massachusetts but outside of Boston are getting eCards, and it’s impacting their contracts elsewhere in the state. And there’s just nothing the BPL can legally do about that, since its mandate includes serving the entire Commonwealth.

By: LK

LK — Fri, 01 May 2009 16:54:53 +0000

I just looked at the BPL’s ecard registration page [http://catalog.mbln.org/ipac20/ipac.jsp?profile=bpl1&menu=account]

The BPL has made it trivially easy to get a 3-year ecard using a fake name and nonexistent address.

Unless they consider every dishonest person on the World Wide Web to be part of their service population, this looks to me like a gaping security hole.

By: Michael

Michael — Fri, 01 May 2009 14:59:16 +0000

The Boston Public/EBSCO situation isn’t as cut and dried as it may seem.

The BPL’s service population isn’t the City of Boston. “As Library of Last Recourse [for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts], the Library’s legal mandate includes the following objectives: 1) to develop, maintain, and preserve comprehensive collections of a research and archival nature to supplement the library resources of the Commonwealth, and 2) to provide to all citizens of the Commonwealth access to the reference and research collections of the Boston Public Library.” [1] In short: The BPL is legally obligated to provide all residents of the Commonwealth with access to all services. And it’s not like EBSCO didn’t know that when they issued the contract.

The issue is that the BPL has elected to make it *easy* for someone in, say, Springfield (an hour and a half away) or North Adams (3 hours away) to gain access to remotely-accessible resources by instituting a self-signup eCard program.

Where this starts to impact EBSCO is in the fact that Springfield can now turn around and say, “Nah, we’re not going to renew our EBSCO license because our patrons can legally use the BPL’s resources.”

So what’s the solution? Force anyone in the state who wants to use their taxpayer-funded library resources to start with a trip to Boston? Empower every library in the state to issue BPL borrowers’ cards, incurring an enormous expense in infrastructure, connectivity and training? Or continue with a self-registration eCard system that requires users to attest to their residency in order to complete the process?

[1] http://www.bpl.org/research/aboutrl.htm

By: eli

eli — Fri, 01 May 2009 14:42:31 +0000

That’s an excellent point, Peter. Rosetta Stone’s success in taking the product to the people and cutting the libraries out of their business while incurring essentially no ill will has surely been noticed by the other database vendors, even accounting for the relatively high appeal of language learning compared to research databases. On the other hand, it’s very hard to imagine that a full text index marketed directly to end users could possibly bring in as much revenue as libraries are pouring down these vendor’s throats at the moment, especially since libraries still struggle to demonstrate to casual users how these products are preferable to stuff on the open web. On the gripping hand, we generally suck at marketing.

By: Adri

Adri — Fri, 01 May 2009 13:06:37 +0000

ProQuest “sponsors” NPR too – I figured EBSCO was doing it to pimp their line of fishing rods. ;-)

By: Peter Bromberg

Peter Bromberg — Fri, 01 May 2009 11:33:28 +0000

Adri, I think it’s worth pondering why Ebsco IS advertising on NPR. Who are they advertising to?? If we put these two things together:
1) Ebsco Advertising directly to the end user
2) Ebsco putting time/energy (and spending political capital with libraries) to limit libraries’ ability to provide Ebsco to customers.

It looks like they might be moving toward offering direct, fee-based service to end users.

By: Adri

Adri — Fri, 01 May 2009 00:17:46 +0000

I was recently re-reading all our vendor licenses – the key thing seems to be the validation process of the user to guarantee they are eligible to be a library card holder for your institution – and not some scary “other” trying to access a resource for free. So instead of working with the libraries to allow their virtual services to thrive and increase use they choose to restrict access. Grandma called that throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

This is also interesting considering another vendor is working with a large metropolitan area to test access to their database by (potentially) allowing a free pass based on ISP for a geographic area.

This is a big PR mistake on EBSCOs part – and they would have to sponsor a whole hell of a lot more of NPR to make up for it.

By: DrWeb

DrWeb — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 21:04:01 +0000

It has been coming to the front as an issue for awhile, and this situation might elevate it for more discussions. SFPL’s library system — and more and more systems now in use and coming — allows this “online” (starter) access to “speed” things up, for new users mostly. It allows a temporary :) card to be obtained immediately, and users can then do certain things with this card – including search online databases that are on the library’s authentication scheme. Once they go in to the library, to get the card, it’s verified where they live, eligible status, and the card is made full or not.
SFPL’s sign-up as we saw it was not limited by any geography to their user population; anyone anywhere could get this card, and use it (I can’t recall for how long) to search the databases. I think the vendor considered this non-geographic specific aspect of issuing online cards the problem. I’m sure we’ll hear more about this one.
Best,
DrWeb
(speaking only for himself)