Librarians are expert at helping people find the information they need. In publicly funded institutions, that help is offered to all, not just to specific clients.

The information may be out there, but the librarian can help people to find the most relevant information, not just what shows up on the front screen of Google.

That’s something publishers can’t provide.

Many of them would like to continue to use those materials, but our licenses with the publishers restrict access to currently enrolled students and currently employed faculty/staff. The vast majority of our graduates are not going to pay the high cost of license fees for this information, but they might pay a small fee to get remote access as an alumnus. This is a question that we get on a regular basis and to my knowledge only Proquest has made any provisions at all for alumni to be included in their license.

If the publisher and the library were able to work together, a fee structure could be developed that would allow independent researchers to subscribe through the library, with both publisher and library collecting a piece of the fee. The library would serve as a marketing arm for the publisher and the publisher would see some increased revenue. While there will never be enough who want continued access to generate vast amounts of additional income, something is always better than nothing (especially in these economic times).

So rather than work around the library, publishers should work with the library to expand access to materials that we already have, generating additional income in the process. This allows the library to better serve its community and the publisher to reach customers that they would never reach independently — a definite win-win situation for each side of the information equation.