I just opened the letter from Brian Cahill, Director, Marketing Law School Libraries for Thomson Reuters. It announced an increase of a little over $4 per FTE for academic year 2009-2010. For my school, that amounts to an increase of several thousand dollars. Call me a fool, but I had hoped that with inflation running at
0% and library budgets being cut at every type of school, public and private, the vendors might have kept prices steady for the coming year. The letter from Mr. Cahill announces a few minor (to me, anyway) tweaks to TWEN, but otherwise doesn't allude to any major enhancements to Westlaw content or functionality. Shabby behavior on the part of Thomson!
More to the point, what do they suppose we are going to cut in order to keep paying their rising prices? It will most likely be a West subscription since they publish most of what we buy. In fact, I think I will make it a point to make it up out of West publications, as opposed to any other publisher. The same goes for any raises in Lexis prices. How convenient that they have entered the print market!
ReplyDeletesnark, snark, snark. Now that I've gotten the snark out of my system, I am quite impressed with the chain of commentary that has been coming along at the lawlibdir-l. I am very impressed with my colleagues, though depressed at the future I think they are forecasting for us. I think I need to consider whether it's appropriate to summarize or discuss it in a post.
ReplyDeleteI heard from a source at Thomson that they are aware of what's being said on lawlibdir-l and don't care. They figure they have beaten Lexis and have no other competition. Hence, they can do what they want. It's hard to know what will happen in the future, but it probably won't be good.
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