What price information
Information today may be envisaged as passing through a chain of hands from its point of origin to its point of use: as information originators and users have become more separate in place or time, various types of intermediaries have grown up to fill the gap between them. Online services involve several of the links in the chain and I want to consider the theme of this meeting, "Concepts of marketing and pricing online services", from the point of view of one of them in particular, namely the search intermediary or library. This is the point at which many of the final recipients of the information, the end-users, currently meet the chain of information provision; it is where much of the marketing of information is done and where the users form their judgement of the utility of the various means of its provision, and it will probably remain so for some time to come in spite of the current interest in by-passing this link and selling to end-users direct. Although the paper's title mentions only the price of information, it is hardly possible to discuss price without considering also value and costs, since the perceived value of the information received will determine in large part what price the market will bear, while the costs of production and delivery will determine the minimum price which one must charge. I am particularly concerned with those fields which may be loosely lumped together as academic and public library information-science, medicine, the humanities and general. Here we have special problems with perceptions of the value of information and thus its marketing and pricing; in this paper I shall briefly consider these and the ways in which closer cooperation between libraries and the providers of the services we are selling may help to solve some of them.
Pricing strategies and impacts on producers, vendors and users
The author assumes that the time has arrived when conflicts, in economic terms, among the three principal participants in the online information area must be considered inevitable. At this point, the database producers, the vendors, and the end-users must attempt to identify a compromise solution under which all parties will be able to carry out effectively their respective functions, and in some measure to safeguard their positions. The present paper deals at some length with the historically conditioned perspectives and practical approaches of the three parties here involved. After a review of the background to the current situation, the author discusses first the pricing strategies of the producers, and the various factors which have contributed to determining these strategies. There follow then a consideration of the pricing and marketing approaches adopted by vendors, and an examination of the 'buying strategies' exercised by users. Users' perceptions are in part, one must recognize, influenced by the advanced technology (e.g. for telecommunication, data-capturing) now available. Cost-factors for the various components of online information provision, revenue-sources among these components, and a combination of the two aspects are presented in schematic form, in order to make clear how it is that a basis for conflict exists. Moreover, we may note that the demarcations between the traditional roles of the three parties are breaking down - a process which leads to economic uncertainty and an atmosphere of disharmony. Not so far from where we are meeting, the first fatality of the American Civil War took place. Colonel Ellsworth of the First New York Regiment was shot and killed by a southern sympathizer, James Jackson, who ran a 'public house', or bar. Besides alerting us to be careful of what we say to bartenders, in Alexandria, those of you who took American History I in school will remember that the Civil War was often called the "irrepressible conflict". The basic economic and emotional issues of use and re-use have remarkable parallels in the issues that made the Civil War irrepressible. Let us hope that the tragic consequences that attended that dispute can be avoided. To present any technical topic one requires some sort of structure .- a logical beginning, middle and end. As we travel from meeting to meeting, the degree to which speakers accomplish this is the measure of listener acceptance and under­ standing. I have tried, with varying degrees of success, in more than twenty years of presentations, to install logical structures to help myself and my listeners, but in the case of this particular topic, I must admit defeat.
Flocculation tests with electrophoretically separated serum proteins.
Campbell, H. A., Smith, W. K., Roberts, W. L. & Link, K. P. (1941). J. biol. Chem. 138, 1. Clayton, C. C. & Baumann, C. A. (1944). J. Nutrit. 27, 155. Davies, A. W. (1933). Biochem. J. 27, 1770. Davies, A. W. & Moore, T. (1934). Biochem. J. 28, 288. Herbst, E. J., Paveek, P. L. & Elvehjem, C. A. (1944). Science, 100, 338. Light, R. F., Alscher, R. P. & Frey, C. N. (1944). Science, 100, 225. Moore, T. & Wang, Y. L. (1943). Biochem. J. 37, viii. Moore, T. & Wang, Y. L. (1945). Biochem. J. 39, 222. Overman, R. S., Field, J. B., Baumann, C. A. & Link, K. P. (1942). J. Nutrit. 23, 589. Overman, R. S., Stahmann, M. A., Sullivan, W. R., Huebner, C. F., Campbell, H. A. & Link, K. P. (1942). J. biol. Chem. 142, 941. Paveek, P. L., Herbst, E. J. & Elvehjem, C. A. (1945). J. Nutrit. 30, 1. Poumeau-Delille, G. (1943). C.R. Soc. Biol., Pari8, 137, 604. Tomaszewski, von W. & Engel, C. (1939). Z. VitaminforWch. 9, 238. Vedder, E. B. & Rosenberg, C. (1938). J. Nutrit. 16, 57. Yudkin, S. (1941). Biochem. J. 35, 551.