A Payments System For The Consortium

It is unrealistic to assume that all use of a future digital library will be without any charging mechanisms even though the research library of today charges for little except for photocopying and user fines. This is not to assume that the library user is charged for each use, although that would be possible. A more likely scenario would be that the library pay on behalf of the members of the scholarly community (i.e., student, professor, researcher) that it supports. According to our proposed consortial model, libraries would be charged for use of the digital library according to the total pages "read" in any given user session. It could be easily worked out that users who consult the digital library on the premises of the campus library would not be charged themselves, but if they used the digital library from another campus location or from off-campus through a network, that they would pay a per-page charge analogous to the cost of photocopying. A system of charging could include categorization by type of user, and the Rights Manager system provides for a wide variety of charging models, including the making of distinctions of usage in soft-copy format, hard-copy format, and downloading of

a work in whole or in part. Protecting the rights of the owner is an especially interesting problem when the entire work is downloaded in a digital format. Both visible and invisible watermarking are techniques with which we have experience for protecting rights in the case of downloading an entire work.

We also have in mind that libraries that provide input via scanning to the decentralized, digital library would receive a credit for each page scanned. It is clear that the value of the digital library to the end user will increase as higher degrees of completeness in digitized holdings is achieved. Therefore, the credit system to originating libraries should recognize this value and reward these libraries according to a formula that charges and credits with a relative credit-to-charging ratio of perhaps ten to one; that is, an originating library might receive a credit for scanning one page equal to a charge for reading ten soft-copy pages.

The charge-and-credit system for our new consortial model is analogous to that used for the highly successful Online Computer Library Center's cataloging system. Member libraries within OCLC contribute original cataloging entries in the form of MARC records for the OCLC database as well as draw down a copy of a holding's data to fill in entries for their own catalog systems. The system of charging for "downloads" and crediting for "uploads" is repeated in our consortial model for retrospective scanning and processing of full-text journal articles. Just as original cataloging is at the heart of OCLC, original scanning is at the heart of our new consortial model for building the library of the future.