"With
Portals, licensing increasingly makes sense..."
By Stephen Rhind-Tutt
It is the nature of the Web to disaggregate. It allows the linking
and distribution of billions of separate words, pages and sites,
but to do this the content has to be distilled into individual bits.
At the same time there is a strong force to aggregate materials on
the Web - users want all their information in one place, instantly
accessible, and with a minimum number of steps to reach it. These
two forces are inexorably driving scholarly publishing towards discipline
specific Websites. These sites can provide users with one-stop, high
quality, materials in an organized, well indexed way.
Chadwyck-Healey’s Literature Online product was an early
example of such a site. Launched in 1996, it collected over 220,000
primary texts in English and American Literature, together with
dictionaries, biographical material and secondary resources, so
providing students and researchers with a unique, highly integrated
reference tool. Other examples include The Gale Group’s Resource
Center series, and CIS’ Universe series. The number of these
products is growing.
It should come as no surprise to NFAIS members that such products
are successful. The key to these sites – comprehensive coverage
of a specific subject – is something that bibliographic indexes
have been doing for many years. Adding the full-text of these and
other relevant content is a logical next step.
In the past there were a number of strategies that did not require
materials to be licensed. In the print and CD-ROM worlds, for example,
products are naturally separate. Many organizations were – and
are - able to create, sell and market their own products.
In the Web world linking and interconnecting information is an
increasingly large part of the value added. Not the content itself.
Companies like Yahoo, Google and AltaVista are good examples of
this. Despite the fact that much of the content they point to is
of low value, the value of their linking makes up for it.
As more and more discipline specific Websites are created, the
demand for different packages of information is going to grow.
A file on agriculture will have records of relevance for business.
A file on business will have relevance for psychology.
The response from publishers to this must be to license their information
more broadly. If they don’t they risk isolating their content.
It will no longer be part of the information infrastructure, and
other publishers will begin to create competitive products.
There are other dangers in not licensing information. Many users
are not going to wade through multiple screens from separate publishers
to get to the information they need. Convenience often beats out
quality. How often do researchers skip microform research and use
online resources only ?
In the past licensing data was viewed askance by publishers who
had their own Websites. The risks of cannibalization were too high
to offset the potential benefits. In the Web world this need not
be the case. One of the virtues of electronic data is that it can
be reshaped in hundreds of different ways. A reference work can
be mined for facts, a bibliographic record often has all the elements
within it to serve as a Directory.
Yet another aspect of the need to license is that in the electronic
world it is that there is unlikely to be the profusion of different
reference titles that exist in the print world. For example, there
are over 100 encyclopedias of music in print form. Many of them
duplicate, summarize or reformat the same material. These titles
survive because they use less paper, or are more portable, or have
more images, so offering the user lower prices or better functionality.
This is unlikely to happen on the Web. The variable cost of distributing
a larger work with many images (and even video and audio) is often
close to the variable cost of distributing a smaller work, so those
who own the major work have the option to sell at at almost the
same cost as the minor one. Even where the market wants smaller
package, the cost to extract a subset of an electronic work is
relatively low. And when a user conducts a search across multiple
works they typically don’t want multiple entries that provide
similar overviews of the same topics: users will naturally go for
comprehensive resources that do not duplicate materials. The way
to crack this market is to license data widely across multiple
sites. The most used electronic Music encyclopedia is probably
the MUZE database, which was developed from the Guinness Encyclopedia
of Music. Parts of it are to be found in online music catalogs,
Websites that review music, promote record companies as well as
a host of news sites and sites dedicated to specific artists.
Unlike print, electronic content will not be driven by size, printing
quality or distribution. Instead cost to reach market, relevance
to community, and level of integration in core, high value processes
will carry the day. For most licensing gives you the best chance
of maximizing your revenues with the lowest risk
As always there are exceptions. If you are lucky enough to own
a very high profile product that dominates its area you might well
be in a position to go it alone, and force others to license to
you. Should Encyclopedia Britannica have licensed some of its material
to create Encarta ? You be the judge…
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