Database Trials - details

[John Creech]

Colleagues,

I am setting up database trials for my campus and am going about it
differently than in the past.  I'd love to hear from anyone as to how they
handle trials.  Here at the CWU Library we've always limited trials access
to the staff segment of our library subnet.  This was done historically
and I've not taken the time until now to pursue doing things differently.

NOTE--I'm struggling with a combination of politics, the mission of a
regional university, and budgets, as concerns this project.

So I have a series of questions--

* Do you throw trials open to your entire campus community?  If so, how
have vendors reacted?  Did you notice degradation of info delivery from
having a number of campus users hitting the trial databases?

* Do you limit trials to faculty only?  So far that's where we're at on
this round.  We can log faculty into our website and using EZproxy
allow them remote access too.  Not to denigrate the value of our student
users, but from a political standpoint I want our faculty to feel that
they've had some level of input to the decision-making process.  Am I
crazy to limit to faculty only?

As a note, FirstSearch, as many of you know, already normally throws the
trial dbases in with existing subscriptions on the same authorization
anyway, so an astute user can click on "List of Databases" and see the
trial.  I still want to give our faculty a secure area, though, with
supporting info and data. In other words, I'll duplicate links to
FirstSearch databases on my faculty trials page.

* Pricing - of course we're looking at significant sums of money
here...but I'd like for my teaching faculty to see and to realize just how
much money is involved in this.  Do any of you make subscription info
available to faculty?  Is that a legitimate thing to do?  We're a state
university dealing with the state public's money.  I want our faculty to
know how expensive this indexing is.  And since I'm logging faculty in to
a secure portion of the website, I'm relatively certain that data on the
page(s) will only get out by word of mouth or forwarded emails etc.
Would it be

a) unethical; or
b) illegal

To post preliminary pricing on a secure web page for faculty to see?

Thanks for any thoughts.

John Creech
Electronic Resources & Systems Librarian
Central Washington University Library
400 E. 8th Ave. | Ellensburg, WA 98926 |
office - 509.963.1081 || fax - 509.963.3684
creechj at www.lib.cwu.edu