The changing nature of subscription agents:
ISA-Rowecom Australia
ISA-RoweCom Australia's article based on Alfred Gans' speech on 10 July 2000, at the Brisbane ASSIG Conference
By Alfred Gans, ISA-RoweCom Australia General Manager.
[ Reproduced with permission from ISA-Rowecom Australia ]
Along with Carolyne Cohn, I have been involved in ASSIG since its inception. It's truly wonderful to see Jenni Jeremy at its head and Secretary Nathalie Schulz, who was largely responsible for organising today, doing such a great job.
During the past 46 years, we have been proudly supplying many of you with subscription services under our previous name, ISA Australia.
During this time, we have provided first-rate service through a dedicated team and we have a well-earned reputation for this.
Our growth was steady, but that growth was inhibited by two major perceptions by clients and potential clients:
The first was the uncertainty surrounding what would happen to ISA Australia when I retired.
The second was ISA Australia's apparent inability to invest in major technological facilities to keep up with state-of-the-art trends.
These inhibitions were removed last August when ISA Australia merged with one of the world leaders in knowledge resources, RoweCom. Now, we can offer not only expert local knowledge but also first-rate facilities with a global reach.
It really is an exciting time for us. We are very proud of our growth and of the way we have grown, and we appreciate the support we have received from clients and friends during these changes. I will be here with RoweCom until August next year.
In fact, the Regional President of RoweCom, Charles Germain was here last week specifically to interview my successor. It is expected he or she will be engaged before the ALIA Conference in October.
Now, in line with the theme for this conference, I am going to speak about:
- RoweCom and the services that are currently succeeding in the United States.
- RoweCom's vision for the future.
- A change to our consolidation and Table of Contents services, which I am officially announcing today.
But first, let me tell you a little more about RoweCom.
Before our involvement with RoweCom, most of you would never have heard of that company.
This is because, before August last year, RoweCom only operated in North America. Since August, RoweCom expanded worldwide, with the acquisition of not only ISA Australia but also the Dawson Information Group operating in USA, UK, France and Spain.
With that acquisition, RoweCom is now one of the top three subscription agents in the world. RoweCom now has offices in the USA, Canada, France, Spain, Brazil, Korea, the UK, and of course, here.
RoweCom itself was established by American Dr Richard Rowe in 1994. It is a progressive company that holds much vision for the future. Dr Rowe is a well-known Harvard professor who attracts very talented people to his cause. But more on that later...
The effect of the GST
You've all experienced the trauma of the GST transition by this stage. This transition cost ISA-RoweCom Australia some $100 000, which we have absorbed. That is the primary reason why we must add the full 10% to our selling price.
As you know, there was no sales tax on serials, so in most instances the increase in price has been the whole 10%.
Overseas journals, which formerly did not incur any taxes, are not expected to reduce in price.
A few Australian publishers have, however, reduced their price before applying the GST. These are mainly popular journals.
We will, of course, pass on any reductions by publishers to our clients.
Remember, it's our job to minimise your GST problems.
For those of you who use our consolidation service, there may be frustrating customs procedures to overcome when we receive boxes of serials from overseas.
These procedures will affect all serials that are aggregated in boxes before they arrive in the country. We are continually reviewing this situation to find the best solution for our clients, and will keep doing so until the issue is resolved.
The future for subscriptions
When discussing the future for this industry, we have realistically moved away from the forecast that everything will be done electronically and paper will be no more.
Popular journals and many others will still be available in print in the future, purely by popular demand.
While the future of electronic and print serials is still being played out, it'll be mostly decisions by librarians, which services succeed and which do not.
Publishers and subscription agents will be guided by librarians in regards to products and services.
Even now, library users are becoming more reliant on the librarian's ability to manage sources of information, rather than merely provide access to information sources.
Information management has become a key phrase in academia and in business. Therefore, it has become an important focus for subscription agents and vendors with intermediary roles.
But it is not only the broad education of that group which has gained interest from subscription agents.
RoweCom's focus has begun to incorporate a plan to improve the quality and efficiency of the knowledge gained.
I have visited the head office of RoweCom, situated in Massachusetts, and met Richard Rowe and senior executives of the company. The executives see Richard as quite a visionary, and some of his ideas for the future are exceptional indeed.
The services of the future
The future of electronic information lies in online facilities to search, to browse, to purchase and to access online information.
One of these services is available now in the United States - RoweCom's kStore.
kStore offers the largest collection of knowledge resources on the Internet to the company desktop.
It is RoweCom's flagship project and this system is not available from any other vendor.
This service was specifically designed for companies and large government departments. For example, this would not be aimed towards the Brisbane City Council's municipal libraries, but would be suitable the BCC's council management.
Through your customised company Intranet, you can offer your staff, wherever they are in Australia, the opportunity to browse and order from a wealth of information in the form of magazines, articles and books that relate to their jobs.
It is an exciting service that we are looking forward to bringing to Australia. It is currently succeeding in the United States. We are expecting this particular service to be available in Australia sometime next year.
Let me say that I will be making sure that it's not just a simple conversion, but fully adapted for Australian use before it is introduced here.
Another of RoweCom's products, kLibrary, is specifically designed for library use.
It's a web-based tool that lets you centrally order, manage, and pay for your institution's serials.
We anticipate kLibrary will be available around the same time as kStore.
It will be services like these that survive in the modern knowledge resource environment. Services that add true value to the electronic information arena while also acknowledging the continued requirements for the print medium.
Just as libraries and publishers are trying to cope with a dual publishing environment, so are subscription agents trying to accommodate both the print and electronic formats. Information Quest, available now in Australia, does just this.
An electronic information delivery solution, Information Quest, simplifies the management of online resources from selection to access.
IQ includes full image desktop delivery of articles, fax document delivery, free-for-view and pay-for-view access.
There is little point denying that the relationship between suppliers and buyers has not always been a thoroughly congenial one - frustration in the negotiation of online licensing is the most recent example.
License Depot is a RoweCom service that makes registration and researching copyright information easy. It is also available now in Australia.
License Depot is simply a web database of electronic journal and licensing resources.
Some licensing conditions are at best described as "non-workable" and continued support from the subscription agent may be exactly what the librarian needs to persuade the publisher to rethink their terms. This ultimately results in a greater understanding of the issues concerning electronic journals and reduces misuse of the medium.
As electronic publishing continues to develop, we hope that the changes will take the requirements of librarians and library users into account.
Changes to ISAcomplete and ISAscan
As you would expect with the merger with RoweCom, we are rebadging our services and developing them further.
Many of you take advantage of our consolidation service, ISAcomplete, which takes the burden of accessioning and preparing your serials from your shoulders onto ours.
We are very proud of the fact that we were the first in Australia to introduce consolidation services to Australian libraries, and relish that we now deliver to over 230 libraries.
You may have also heard of our popular Table of Contents scanning service, ISAscan, which, as far as we know, is the only service of its kind in the world. This service provides all of the T.O.C's for all of your journals so that they are accessible via your library Intranet.
As part of the RoweCom transition, we have renamed these services.
The service you have been calling ISAcomplete is now kReady, and ISAscan is now kTOC. All of our clients would have recently received, or will soon receive, notification about this change.
I stress that the only thing that has changed regarding these services is the name. All procedures and standards have not changed in any way.
The RoweCom vision
Some of the most interesting elements of RoweCom are its visions for the future - for traditional libraries as well as the private sector.
I would like to take some moments discussing this.
You all must have wondered whether electronic delivery will eliminate mediation between writer and user in the future. It is clear that it will not.
In fact, with the information overload that we all are experiencing, the intermediary functions between creators and users (including publishers, subscription agents and librarians) will become more, rather than less, important.
We believe that knowledge will be increasingly perceived as having high economic and personal value.
In the past, some decisions may have been made with a scarcity of knowledge. People tend to assume that the costs of time and money needed to acquire more knowledge outweigh its benefits.
In the future, we believe the opposite will be true: we will increasingly assume that decisions can be made with maximum knowledge, since the costs of time and money will be dramatically lower, relative to other costs.
Our storage of understandings will increasingly become important. It will be the network that enables the whole body of knowledge to be connected and used.
To make full use of this network, we will need librarians.
For business people, there will be a tremendous need among knowledge workers, or professional people, for ways that help them work more effectively and maintain knowledge currency in their field.
This does not mean we will need to read ten times more than we are currently reading. It just means we will need to read more selectively.
Technology will soon make it economically feasible for large numbers of knowledge workers to maintain their own highly customised "personal library" which will be accessible to them pretty much wherever they go.
But with so much information at one's fingertips, knowledge on the net will become a source of stress for many people in this industry.
After a long, long time, RoweCom believes it will be inevitable that cybermediation, the automation of intermediary functions, will steadily take over the traditional middle person roles. This will put the control into the hands of the creators of knowledge.
It will be a long, slow process. But cybermediation will transform most of the jobs that publishers, subscription agents and librarians now have. The result of cybermediation will be richer, more complex, interactive and interdependent scholarly communication networks.
Provided we all adapt, subscription agents will be needed more than ever. RoweCom is preparing for this challenge.
So what does all of this mean for us right now?
Well, ISA-RoweCom Australia is endeavouring to be able to provide clients not only journals and magazines, but books, news, conference information, and distance learning and training courses.
Over the next four years we expect to see a decrease in the percentage of off-line (print) subscriptions in comparison to the increase in on-line subscriptions.
By the year 2007, you'll find the proportion of off-line, or print, subscriptions will continue to fall.
This is the reason to sit up and take notice of experienced, advanced providers like RoweCom who can help with the electronic and print process.
As the Australian representative of this extremely successful company, we are excited and positive about the future for this industry and the value of the services we have and can provide you.
Copyright: Do not reproduce, in part or in full, without the permission of RoweCom Australia Pty Ltd. For information, contact Kym Howell, marketing & projects officer, RoweCom Australia, on 07 3371 7500 or at kym@rowecom.com.au.
