July 1, 2008

Hi folks,

At some point this summer, you will notice the disappearance of the Oregonian resource link from the OSLIS website.  Here is the reason why........



At their June 13, 2008, meeting the State Library Board voted to accept the recommendation of the Statewide Database Licensing Advisory Committee to discontinue negotiations with NewsBank for access to the Oregonian database.

As you may remember from an earlier message and from our survey, NewsBank proposed to raise the cost of the state license for the Oregonian database from $54,000 to $150,000 for the 2008-2009 fiscal year. In making their

recommendation to the Board the SDLAC was very concerned about agreeing to such a large increase in the cost of this product, particularly in light of the modest use the database gets in most Oregon libraries. The SDLAC

discussed the possibility of trying again, in a year or so, to get a more reasonably priced statewide license to the Oregonian database. If your district is interested in a subscription to the Oregonian they will need to work directly with NewsBank.



We have discussed how to provide a newspaper presence on the OSLIS website and, while we won’t be able to provide the access to the Oregonian, there are some options we are exploring using our EBSCO subscription. We will have something in place by the beginning of school and will make sure we communicate our solution to you and make it apparent on the OSLIS website.



We also wanted to make you aware that the Oregon Department of Education, through their Virtual School District, will be providing $100,000 of the $161,932 for K-12 access to the EBSCO databases in 2008-2009.



State Library, Library Development