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.
Costing and pricing information: the bottom line
Over the past decade there has been a substantial increase in both the number and variety of information products available and whilst some of these have been small scale, operating on a regional basis or within a narrowly defined subject discipline, others have been global and comprehensive. Delivery mechanisms have also varied from highly personalised services, to online computers and newer technologies like CD‐ROM. But one issue that has emerged over this period which has been of common concern to both providers and consumers alike, is that of costing and pricing and, in particular the development of effective pricing policies. To some extent the reasons why this is so are complex and derive from the complex nature of information itself, and I hope to return to these later in the paper. But others relate more to issues of policy and strategy and these do need to be established before pricing issues can be effectively addressed.
Migration from print to online use
Database publishers have good reason to fear the potential effects of migration from the use of printed services to the use of online services. This paper examines the economics of publishing information services and the effects of migration on profitability. It also points out the likely increasing frequency of experimentation with other than connect‐time charging for online access and three factors other than migration that are important considerations in pricing decisions.