Economics and Usage of Digital Library Collections: March 23

(Mar 25, 2000) A feature article on the March conference proceedings is online.
The conference description and information on this and following pages are here for archival purposes. Copies of abstracts, papers, and slides for many of the talks are online here as well, linked from the conference program and from the list of conference speakers.

The Program for Research on the Information Economy (PRIE) and the University Library at the University of Michigan are sponsoring a research conference on the economics and use of digital library collections. The conference will take place in Ann Arbor, Michigan, on March 23 & 24, 2000 in the Ehrlicher Room (411 West Hall) at the U-M School of Information. Any interested parties may register to participate. The primary audience consists of research scholars, librarians, and publishers with an interest in the challenging opportunities associated with digital publication, distribution and collection management of scholarly materials.

PEAK and the University of Michigan

We are hosting this conference to mark the end of the PEAK (Pricing Electronic Access to Knowledge) experiment run by the University of Michigan from 1996-1999. PEAK was a large-scale trial of production-quality digital library services hosted by a non-profit intermediary, and a field experiment on the economics and usage of digital access to scholarly communications. For 18 months, all users from 12 universities and industrial research facilities had electronic access to all of the content from the approximately 1200 Elsevier Science journals published between January 1996 and August 1999. Access was provided through a mixture of pricing options, with economic decisions made by institutional librarians and individual users. PEAK made available more than 10 million pages (nearly 850,000 articles) of content, to approximately 340,000 authorized users, with over $500,000 in paid transactions. There were more than 180,000 article accesses (to more than 110,000 different articles).

We anticipate that results from the PEAK project will be presented in one segment of the conference, but most of the conference will consist of presentations concerning other projects and research.

The University of Michigan has been a leader in research, development and production of digital publishing and distribution. Other UM projects include TULIP, hosting and production for JSTOR, the Humanities Text Inititative, the Making of America Collection, and others.

Questions?

Contact the conference organizers at peak-conference@umich.edu or at (734)647-8031.