Featured Publication
Economics and Usage of Digital Libraries: Byting the Bullet
Jeffrey K. MacKie-Mason and Wendy Pradt Lougee, Editors
In the late 1990's, researchers and digital library staff at the University of Michigan collaborated on deploying PEAK, a full-scale digital access system to enable usage of all of Elsevier’s scholarly journals (then about 1200), and conducting a field experiment to answer questions about the interplay between pricing models and usage. The experiment culminated in a lively conference that engaged scholars, libraries and publishers. This volume captures some of the most interesting and provocative discussions to come out of that conference, and is a valuable record of thinking about the potential for highly functional journal content and new economic models of publishing. The motivating questions of PEAK remain relevant in today's publishing climate.
