Perpetual Archive Licenses and Continuing Service Fees: What They Mean and How They Work

By Susan Bokern (Vice President, Product Management, ProQuest) <Susan.Bokern@proquest.com>

The role of libraries is constantly evolving, and partners like ProQuest are evolving, too. We’re continuously making improvements to our platform, services and infrastructure to deliver the best experience to our customers for better teaching, learning, research, and library administration.

In addition to our products, we’re also working to evolve our business models. Customers acquire ProQuest content through a variety of models that work best for their budgets — including subscription, perpetual archive license (PAL), access-to-own, and in some cases, one-time transactions. We periodically get questions about how these access models work, so today, we wanted to take this opportunity to explain the details behind PALs and continuing service fees (CSFs).

PALs and CsFs

Customers use PALs to make one-time purchases that build their libraries’ owned collections. PALs are typically used for historical archival products (including ProQuest Congressional, House of Commons Parliamentary Papers, Historical Newspapers, Recent Newspapers, Periodicals Archive Online, The Vogue Archive, Harper’s Bazaar, Women’s Wear Daily, Early English Books Online and Alexander Street’s primary sources products, among many others). ProQuest charges CSFs annually for most PAL purchases. We take these CSFs and invest them back into our products, platforms, and user experience to ensure they continue to grow, improve, and meet users’ needs.

CSFs are charged by product and are determined by the size and the complexity of each product. Customers who purchase products on a frequent basis are not charged additional fees once they reach a certain threshold for “closed” (completed) content sets. For products that continue to grow — such as the Vogue Archive — the CSF covers new content added each year. For some historical newspapers, like the Chicago Tribune and The Washington Post, CSFs cover additional backfile ownership as well as ongoing content added each year. Our source providers are important to us and our relationship with them allows us to keep adding additional years of their content.

What Do CsFs support?

They support value-add improvements to product interfaces, search functionality, cross-searchability with other similar content, indexing, hosting, security, 24/7 access, and customer support. They bolster the development of free MARC records, administrative console tools for librarians, and updated compliance with usage statistics like COUNTER and authentication standards such as Shibboleth and Athens, critical for remote online access. They support the maintenance and growth of a metadata repository used by the major discovery systems (Summon, Primo, OCLC and others). Long after the initial release of a product, we use CSFs to improve its user experience. For example, in 2019 and in 2020, we migrated Early European Books (EEB) and Early English Books Online (EEBO) from legacy platforms to the main ProQuest platform, forming Early Modern Books. We updated both products to a modern interface, and normalized indexing and author names to facilitate a combined search across both product lines. EEB subject classifications were assigned to all 146,000 EEBO titles so both products could be aligned and cross-searched. Author names, places of publications and document features across three centuries of content were normalized. Our objective was to make the content from the Early Modern period more discoverable, which offers even more possibilities for scholars to pursue groundbreaking research. CSFs contribute to these enhancements. If our customers had already purchased the products as a perpetual archive, they now benefit from the improvements.

What’s Next?

We are currently completing migrating our Black Studies Center product just released in April with an improved user experience on the ProQuest platform, with more enhancements to come this fall. After that we will be migrating and improving The Gerritsen Collection, Patrologia Latina and Acta Sanctorum, all products used by our customers since their initial launch years ago. Again, CSFs will help support these enhancements.

Conclusion

From everything we’ve learned from our longstanding relationships with libraries, there’s one thing that stands out: the need to evolve and improve is constant. Historical archives are a strategic asset for libraries; ensuring their safekeeping, improving access, and devising new ways to meet customer’s needs are all core to what we do. We know that libraries don’t have unlimited budgets, so when it comes to CSFs, we ensure that we invest them back into building better products and user experiences.