The Survey of Library Database Licensing Practices (PDF)

The study presents data from 90 libraries—corporate, legal, college, public, state, and non-profit libraries—about their database licensing practices. More than half of the participating libraries are from the USA, and the rest are from Canada, Australia, the UK, and other countries. Data is broken out by type and size of library, we well as for overall level of database expenditure. The 100+ page study, with more than 400 tables and charts, presents benchmarking data enabling librarians to compare their library's practices to peers in many areas related to licensing. Metrics provided include: percentage of licenses from consortiums, spending on consortium dues, time spent seeking new consortium partners, number of consortium memberships maintained; growth rate in the percentage of licenses obtained through consortiums; expectation for consortium purchases in the future; number of licenses, growth rate in the number of licenses, spending on licenses for directories, electronic journals, e-books, and magazine/newspaper databases; future spending plans on all of the above; price inflation experienced for electronic resources in business, medical, humanities, financial, market research, social sciences and many other information categories; price inflation for e-books, electronic directories, journals, and newspaper/magazine databases; percentage of licenses that require passwords; percentage of licenses that have simultaneous access restrictions; spending on legal services related to licenses, percentage of libraries that have threatened to sue a database vendor; percentage of libraries that have been threatened with suits by database vendors; number of hours spent in reviewing license contracts; percentage of contracts that require contract terms be kept secret; level of awareness of the terms of other libraries contracts; contract terms regarding inter-library loan; success rates in seeking changes in license contracts; percentage of libraries that have paid an article processing fee or received a rebate as compensation for open access; number of articles obtained through digital repositories; planned development of digital repositories; use of journal archives provided for free after an embargo period; use of Google Scholar; percentage that report loss of perpetual access to journal archives; percentage of journal contracts that guarantee perpetual access; use of grants for financing databases; use of charge backs and departmental contributions to finance database licensing; percentage that outsource copyright clearance; plans for the elimination of paper-base course reserves; expectations for renewing current database subscriptions; number of databases tried on a free trial basis; rated reliability of usage statistics obtained from database vendors; staff time spent on service interruption issues.