Introduction

This chapter examines the issues facing corporate information professionals when purchasing and rolling out subscription resources to end-users. The authors have extensive experience in the area, working for law firms based in the UK and USA. While experiences may vary, their advice should be relevant to those managing subscriptions in all sizes of organization. Other variables include the type of licence models offered by the supplier, the size of the organization, the corporate culture and the position of the information service within it, but many issues remain common to all. As a coda to the chapter, a supplier offers her perspective on the relationship between vendor and subscriber, and some advice on how to make it beneficial for all parties.

Electronic resources in the organization

The library or information centre in a large corporation was traditionally a single, centralized facility, often a centrally located showplace in the organization's largest office, and it could appear that this research repository was the ‘beating heart’ of operations within the firm. In law firms it was not unusual to see bookcases and aisles of extensive rows of reports, case law, statutes, regulations, and annotated treatises, reflecting the collections used in law school. However, once online legal research providers began gathering and indexing legal knowledge, offering full-text access, these collections began to seem unwieldy. Even before the advent of the web, the library offered an access point to these resources, as an adjunct to the physical space visited by staff needing to carry out research. Today, staff distributed around the offices of global firms have access to the knowledge they need at their fingertips, on their desktop PC and even on their mobile devices. Sophisticated aggregation and distribution of alerts as well as the full-text versions of materials are managed by information professionals, many of whom never see their users.

In most large US law firms, the information service continues to be recognized as the central point for the organization of the electronic and digital versions of those same print resources, often via the organization’s intranet. In many firms, the information service maintains a separate site or ‘page’ on the network or intranet, which brings together the electronic resources, providing instruction on how to access the resources and who to contact for specialized research.