Here's Money: Give Me an Article!

I like this post from Sarah at Librarian in Black about DeepDyve, a new service that provides limited time access to online articles at the low low price of 99 cents.

She notes:

While I like the idea of being able to purchase articles one at a time instead of having to buy a yearly subscription if you don’t want one, it saddens me that services like this exist…and get subscribers. If only their customers would get library cards (for free) and access the articles they need for free from the library’s website. The success of a service like this speaks to the horrible job we’ve done as a profession of getting the word out about what we do.

Good point, that. I too appreciate the fact that a service exists to provide affordable access to a single article if that's all you want (it hearkens back to my deep-seated longing to buy a single cable channel), but it's certainly true that we'd like a person's first thought to be "does my library have access to this journal?"

I am definitely going to be looking closely at DeepDyve as an option for those occasions when it turns out we don't have access to the journal a patron needs, though. Because sadly those occasions do arise, and I hate to disappoint the wonderful, library-literate people whose first thought actually is "does my library have access to this journal?"

It seems likely that DeepDyve would cover a lot of the big, popular journals that we're likely to subscribe to, so I'll have to try to think of something we don't get that people ask for before I can test its value as a backup for our collection. And of course right now my mind is a blank. But something will come to me in time.

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