In a paper written by Manager of eServices at St. John’s University Library Brian Mikesell, titled "Fee or Free? New Commercial Services are Changing the Equation," which was presented at the Tenth Off-Campus Library Services Conference held in April last year, Mikesell states the following:

"Online full-text research services. . . are targeting faculty and undergraduates directly, offering them library-like services for a fee. This has caused a great deal of negative response in the library community, because these companies seem to be trying to compete with and undercut freely available library services."

With XanEdu, for instance, a distance learning faculty member can use one of XanEdu’s services by going online to create a CoursePak of copyright-cleared electronic readings and resources for his or her class that enrolled students would be required to purchase for a fee, similar to purchasing a textbook for a class. This kind of service is similar to what an online library services department could also supply to that same faculty member through the resources the library already has purchased and licensed, which are typically funded by pre-paid student fees.

"The students are already paying for the resources that we provide, so if a faculty member is asking them to pay for a CoursePak through Xanedu [that could have been created by the school library], they are paying twice," says Mikesell in a recent interview with Educational Pathways.

Another issue that comes into play is that, in some cases, online library services personnel can be ineffective in providing XanEdu-like services in a timely fashion because of staffing and resource-allocation problems.

"That also puts us [higher education libraries] in an untenable position," says Mikesell. "If we aren’t providing things that people want, then they are going to go elsewhere. So we do think that we have a stake in this."

Mikesell claims that higher education libraries need to be highly cognizant of both the limits and advantages of all the library products and services provided by a growing list of commercial vendors.

In that spirit, below is a list of online-library-oriented products and services culled from Mikesell’s paper as well as from some of our own research, with brief abstracts taken from their Web sites. (This is by no means an exhaustive list):

EzProxy
An easy to setup and easy to maintain program for providing users with remote access to Web-based licensed databases.