Well, this is the thing: we're a small, highly-specialized collection, 
so I'm not talking about indexing the whole range of content which a 
university like JHU or even a small liberal arts college would need 
to--it's really a matter of a few key databases in our field(s). Don't 
get me wrong, it's still a slightly crazy idea, but I'm dissatisfied 
enough with existing solutions that I'd like to try it.

On 6/30/2010 4:15 PM, Jonathan Rochkind wrote:
> A little bit of both, I think. A library probably _could_ negotiate 
> access to that content... but it would be a heck of a lot of work. 
> When the staff time to negotiations come in, it becomes a good value 
> proposition, regardless of how much the licensing would cost you.  And 
> yeah, then the staff time to actually ingest and normalize and 
> troubleshoot data-flows for all that stuff on the regular basis -- 
> I've heard stories of libraries that tried to do that in the early 90s 
> and it was nightmarish.
>
I wonder if they would, in fact, demand licensing fees. I mean, we're 
already paying a subscription, and they're already exposing their 
content as a target for federated search applications (which probably do 
some caching for performance)...
> So, actually, I guess i've arrived at convincing myself it's mostly 
> "good value proposition", in that a library probably can't afford to 
> do that on their own, with or without licensing issues.
-- 
Cory Rockliff
Technical Services Librarian
Bard Graduate Center: Decorative Arts, Design History, Material Culture
18 West 86th Street
New York, NY 10024
T: (212) 501-3037
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