FW: Questia: who is behind it?

[Drew, Bill]

I am forwarding this message with Mr. Cannon's permission and encouragement.
It shows that Questia is not the big ogre it appears to be.  It does show
that they need to communicate better with libraries and librarians.

Bill Drew

-----Original Message-----
From: Kelly Cannon [mailto:kcannon at HAL.MUHLBERG.EDU]
Sent: Thursday, February 01, 2001 3:10 PM
To: COLLIB-L at acs.wooster.edu
Subject: Re: Questia: who is behind it?


Our dean of students, library  director, and myself ( a reference
librarian),
all met with a Questia rep. today.  The discussion was informative to say
the
least.

Questia is not offering institutional subscription at publishers' requests.
Publishers do not want Questia to circumvent their academic market
(libraries,
individual scholars).

Questia limits downloading and printing, again at publishers' request.
Individual pages can be downloaded or printed, max. 30 pages a session.

A journal list is not likely to be published. That's because Questia will
not
offer the full text of most of its journals, but rather selected articles as
authors/publishers permit.

Few if any journals are available now.  The weight is in books.

Most of the collection is out-of-print titles from major academic presses.

Librarians now working for the company are pushing, some aggressively, for
Questia to offer institutional licenses.

Questia is marketing aggressively to undergrads, through demos on-campus,
student newspapers, online, and certainly are hoping to get the good will of
librarians, faculty, and administrators.

The rep. did offer us free subscriptions to give our honors students for one
semester.  Our dean declined the offer; she did not like the idea because it
was

yet another marketing ploy.

Questia is not, as far as I can tell,  offering anything more extraordinary
than, say, Lexis-Nexis or Ebscohost--though its strength is, uniquely,
out-of-print academic book titles--which can no doubt be of great value.
I'd
love to discuss Questia in BIs and with individual students, to place it in
a
context.  But I don't want to promote a subscription-only database that  I
can't

be sure students will have access to.

Perhaps Questia could offer a dedicated workstation in the library--it would
give access to all students, and could well result in more subscriptions for
home access.

(Mr.) Kelly Cannon
Humanities Reference Librarian
Muhlenberg College
Allentown PA

"Drew, Bill" wrote:

> If Questia succeeds in taking students away from the library it will be
our
> own fault.  One of our librarians here was telling me that her daughter
has
> yet to see or hear from a librarian either via e-mail or in any of her
> classes.  She is now in her second year. I will not mention what school.
It
> is a well known private university.
>
> The real solution to such efforts as Questia is outreach and marketing to
> our students.  We must go outside of the physical structure of our
libraries
> to where the students and faculty are located in the real world and in the
> virtual world.  How many of you out there send out e-mail to students?
How
> many of you go to class rooms outside of the library?
> How many of you market your libraries to students?  I am asking these as
> rhetorical questions as things to think about.  Question what you are
doing.
> Can you do it better?  Create a topic based e-mail newsletter that answers
> real needs not one telling how many books are in the library and telling
> everyone how good a job you are doing.
>
> The founder of Questia began his company because of problems he had as an
> undergraduate in trying to do research in his library. I hope we all can
do
> better in the future.
>
> ___________________
> Bill Drew ; Associate Librarian, Systems and Reference
> SUNY Morrisville College Library
> drewwe at morrisville.edu <mailto:drewwe at morrisville.edu>
> "The early bird may get the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese!"
--
> Author Unknown