Law libraries commit to platforms. You can’t do electronic legal research without a commitment to one or more large legal information services. Note that I don’t use the terms commercial or comprehensive. They don’t have to be commercial, and none are really comprehensive. As our library learned recently, the platform is often just an aggregation point for content that the service may or may not control. At the same time, information publishers are faced with joining – or leaving – content platforms and shifting from one to another. It made me wonder about the impacts of these changes.
Law libraries have looked at platform choice frequently. I think every library should consider single source commercial legal information. It definitely is cheaper than licensing multiple commercial sources. I realize that it can be hard to manage lawyer – and librarian – expectations around this. There can be a sense (hope?) that we can near a comprehensiveness nirvana by licensing more commercial content.
That’s not what I’m interested in today, though. What about choices that are made elsewhere in the information flow? There are two that I want to touch on:
Interface Impact on Researcher Gain or Loss
We ask people to use a platform when we license a new product. In fact, adherence to a platform seems to be a critical driver for user acceptance. In theory, you could switch between any of multiple commercial legal products each year and have the same general collection coverage. Sure, around the edges some texts might be different. But they’re all search-driven, browseable sets of primary law and secondary commentary.
Most commercial databases are filled with commodity information. The question then becomes how much do you pay for the user-driven selection of specific subject matter, practice area titles. And how much do you accept that, between generally lower legal research ability and an acceptance of good enough legal research, there’s no need to pay for excess content.
What happens to our user base when we switch services? What happens when our researchers have to shift between services – do a search on LexisNexis then flip over to Wolters Kluwer for a tax question? Each of these scenarios has interface costs.
For example. We were licensing two systems in Ontario. Both remote access, so the issue of getting to a library wasn’t involved. One was practice area-focused, and the other was almost entirely primary law, with some very minor secondary textual content (newsletters, I think).
The latter service was also available in libraries across the province. A lawyer who regularly did legal research was probably going to be more familiar this this service. They may not even be aware of the other, if they weren’t in that practice area.
Contrast usage of general and practice-area specific legal information services.
Put aside, for the moment, that the practice area-specific product cost one-third as much as the general use product. Also, while interesting, the large jump in general use in year 3 reflected a coverage change. It’s irrelevant although it didn’t help the case of trying to keep the practice area-specific product.
One regular feedback we had about the lower use database was that the interface was harder to use. I’m not sure objectively it was really that much harder. But it reflected that the interface switching created friction that benefited the preferred product, whichever one that was. It would have been an interesting thing to study but the takeaway was that the lawyer preferred the service they used most often.
The practice area service was dropped soon after as the cost justification became the determining matter.
It can be hard to see impact, though, when you’re dropping or shifting a discrete resource, as opposed to a format. For example, if I have two databases with case law and I cancel one, how do you show the usage increase on the remaining one? In a law firm, using cost recovery, you might be able to contrast past billing against product A with new billing against product B. But usage increases could happen merely by announcing that you might eliminate one, and thereby creating greater exposure for the preferred database. Or the usage may be comparative testing, and so an aberration that won’t continue in the future.
So what about ebooks? One thing I have first hand experience with is that ebook readers are not all created equally. Even the Overdrive app has become the Libby app. Each iteration in interface creates friction as we have to navigate differently to our loans, to our books.
One feature of the Overdrive interface I find frustrating is when it shows a search facet matching the author I’m looking for (Rachel Plotnick, author of the Power Button) and then tells me there are no matches.
I am hoping that some of the public libraries that are moving from Overdrive to Cloudlibrary are keeping statistics. Because this is an entire platform shift (you can only get ebooks from the current single source), user retention should be measurable. It would be interesting to see if they have a user fall off after moving to a new platform, and whether they can identify if it is interface or number of titles or something else. When we’re dealing with issues like how formats (tablet v. physical book) impact reading, I’d be surprised if app interfaces didn’t also make a difference.
Publisher Gain or Loss
I think publisher involvement in aggregators has a similar challenge. This overview of the issue from one publisher’s perspective seems spot on. It’s like doing the hokey pokey and everyone jumps in, but then you’re the only one who jumps out.
This is well trodden ground in the legal research world. Commercial sites are aggregators as much as owners of the content they provide access to. We recently found a case citation in a Thomson Reuters publication that was completely wrong (wrong style, wrong pages, etc.). When we passed the information along, it was passed on to the third-party author to fix.
It’s also not uncommon for a publisher to withdraw some of its content from one of the main services. They get a better deal from a competitor, or they decide to roll their own service, whatever. It puts the law library in the position of then deciding whether to add a new service or not. It would be simple if the withdrawn content resulted in a reduced price for the primary service, but it doesn’t. A new service means a new cost.
And that’s what the media are facing with Apple News+. An all you can eat flat-rate news service is very similar to the flat rate legal research contracts we sign. And, similarly, it will create a faux-comprehensive media aggregator. The price will make people feel like they are getting access to everything.
Perhaps they are. But when a publisher decides that the return isn’t there, and withdraws, is that likely to pull any audience with them? Is that audience likely to say, “Hey, that one publication is worth an annual subscription in addition to my Apple News+ cost!” I don’t know. As someone who has contributed to news media but uses free aggregator apps for news, I’m not sure I’d pay for each additional publication.
It’s like the generalist and practice area-specific licenses. People who aren’t in the practice area can get by with an assortment of sources. Even in legal information, there is a good chance that there is more than one resource covering that topic.
The minority of researchers will need highly focused, substantive content, to the extent that they would follow that content to a second fee-based service. Otherwise there would be no reason for the smaller publishers to engage in the aggregating platforms.
It will be interesting to see the impact of Apple News+. Media strategies focused on apps and paywalls seem to have uneven success. Public libraries may need to rethink their Zinio / RBDigital and Flipster subscriptions if paid aggregator services impact digital magazine usage.
Or it might be that some media conglomerate could approximate what large commercial legal research providers have done. Create a source where you own most of the content and enhance it with additional licensed materials for smaller publishers to create an aggregate that can withstand market price fluctuations.