Conference 2007: Panel session: Business models and sustainability

Business models and sustainability. How do we maintain and develop e-content?

Stuart Dempster (moderator), Director, Strategic Content Alliance, JISC
Catherine Draycott , Chair, BAPLA;
Peter Kaufman , Chief Executive Officer, Intelligent Television
Dan Burnstone, Director of Publishing, Chadwyck-Healey, ProQuest

 

CD: Head of Wellcome images, the photolibrary linked to the Wellcome Trust and chair of BAPLA, the trade association for the picture library industry. BAPLA has 400 members and is the largest in the world. Shows the extent of content in the UK. In the past the models for licencing images have been very complicated in that price can vary from nominal fee to much larger – rights managed. Bigger players ahve come on the market place and have bought up lots of stock photo libraries – the more generic images with multiple purposes. BAPLA includes many specialist libraries. We saw different business models – the oe which frightened us was ‘royalty-free’ which felt threatening but then we saw that it was tapping a different marketplace. Latest terrifying model is market-stock – eg iStockphoto.com. Throws the industry into a tizz of concern. But others look at the models and wonder if there is something in it – if images are a dollar then there is a whole new population who may want to use them. Other models include monthly subscriptions. Some contracts have started to set the fees, eg the Telegraph on a take it or leave it basis. Question of sustaiability right next to business models. Also seeing a convergence of media – newspapers online, more moving images with newspapers, and the edges of education and publishing converging and coming into competition.

Legal context is also evolving. But last year the Gowers review took place and asked questions about copyright. In the US debate around ‘orphan images’ where the owner cannot be traced. Many images on the web cannot find out who owns them so they become orphans, Creators feel threatened by them. But creators also want to help the cultural heritage sector to preserve their content. This new culture of access is long established in the US and becoming more prevalent in the UK. Model licences such as Creative Commons licences are emerging. Wellcome Trust using them for some of their material. Consortium of broadcast companies have created he Creative Archive and BBC has own archive project. All this content needs to be made available to education at all levels.

15% of BAPLA members are from MLA sector. How can we fulfill our remit to educate in a sustainable way? Remits often in conflict as photo libraries may have been but in the trading arm and become a cinderella service as don’t make much money. Cannot compete with the retail activities of the museum. But they do provide invaluable public exposure and huge reputational value for the organisation. But don’t provide much money. Even if fully automate a service and fully e-commerced enabled there will still need to be some human interaction.

So how to cover those costs? Working on a model contract for museums for defining parameters of free access to their collections. Do new business models provide a solution or are their other models? Creators want their work to be preserved and for people to be able to access it. Is there an exchange model which might be win-win for both sides for creators and the academic community? Other ways of sharing revenue. One to be scoped out.

Wellcome Trust now has a Creative Commons licence for its photolibrary – fits with other projects it is working on such as JISC pubmed project. Open access policy. Take a look at the images on the site:
images.wellcome.ac.uk

About 150,000 images available online. All high res digital images. Historical images from all items in the collection. Contemporary images from teaching hospitals and labs, clinical material is restricted in access to healthcare professionals. Do not have to register to download images.

PK: yesterday we spent time discussing new approaches to business models. thought about the way commercial companies look at content and think about value – of their content and their investment in it. They offer us some lessons.

We are all producers and creators of screen-based media. Everything we produced will become a piece of the monetisable cosmos for Google, Amazon, Adobe etc and others we can’t imagine today. If you Google names of places etc you will find that people will be advertising on them. If you have that place name in your email then there will be adverts linked to it.

If want to build value of collections need to take leap into the future. Reference The New Metrics of Scholarly Authority by Michael Jensen, Chronicle of Higher Education. We need to compete in computerbility: increase digital availability of media for indexing and tagging.

It is no coincidence that at the same time Jensen is outlining his ideas, Wall Street is paying attention to the same trends but in the way that commercial companies such as Google operate. Analysts tell us that there is too much choice which leads to consumer vertigo; that making content searchable may be better than making more content available. Search is a 15bn dollar business. Consumer-to-consumer interactions will be the main way to transfer music.

The JISC digitisation strategy avoids the words ‘free’ and ‘open access’ but instead focuses on business models and public/private partnerships. A practical approach, but we need to know what the business interests are.

CBS – The Interactive Audience Network

If we follow all these examples – Jensen, analysts, CBS – might be able to connect better to our users everywhere.

DB: Proquest is an electronic publisher to the academic market. I come from the part of the business that specialises in large collection in humanities and social sciences but other parts publish historical newspapers, dissertations, microfilm, aggregated databases etc. Customers are higher education which gives a particular flavour to our operation. We are an institutional publisher – libraries and consortia tend to buy our products rather than individuals.

Our sales models: operate traditionally two types: subscription (databases continuously updates, does not include ownership or rights to bulk download) and perpetual archive (purchase model, includes ownership). Charge an access fee when sell sing the perpetual model. Business models are changing, however, and we are pleased to be in partnership with JISC and with the Bodlean library on Phase Two Digi projects. Also in negotiation with Uni of Southampton on a cross-indexing digitiation project with Parliamentary papers. Also involved with a project to digitise a Connecticut newspaper with a different kind of partnership funding.

Preservation of data: ownership of data gives the right to an archival copy of that data eg EEBO, currently 30 databases, updated annually, as an insurance policy for customers. Very few static databases – continual evolution and renewal, expectations always rising, compliance with standards re part of the cost of doing business. We have an ongoing interest in the development of resources in the forseeable future. In 3-5 years time commercially-originated content and products will be partly owned and/or developed by users – open web will be harnessed by commercial services to add value – spin offs and repurposing of content will emerge – new modes of access – new partnerships

Questions

Sarah Porter: self-sustainable?

PK: the difference between sustainable and self-sustainable is the difference between getting a million grants and something paying for itself

CD: exchange model between those who hold content and those who want acces – Kew and the National Archive allowed access to those who created digital files according to certain criteria set out by the National Archive. In this case it was a commercial genealogy service. They had access in return for giving the digital files back.

Dan Jones: how to quantify reputation value?

CD: traditonal thing that there are metrics to quantify this used by PR agencies. usually used to put a value on editorial coverage. but this is not quite the same. it’s the kudos of a particular audience when a credit is on an image. so we get coverage for our bio-image awards and the value put on that is in the tens of thousands of pounds per feature. But difficult to quantify. It could be based on what it would cost to buy that advertising space. but then you could ask why charge at all if it’s that good PR. but the cost of the investment means why should they be subsidising the commercial publishers (fine to subsidise the academic sector and not-for-profits).

Bernard Reilly: quantifying that kind of return is going to be extremely important as more content becomes free, what Google’s driving is the advertising model. If that’s the case then MLAs need to understand those returns and what the value is of those returns

Simon Tanner: Example of work we’re doing with the Royal Horticultural Society – they are working on having images on the website but are saying that if you want to see more and better quality images then you need to become a member so monetisation is not the sale of the photos but increased membership and the fees they bring. Also, content as an intangible asset – balanced score card as a means of monetising it