Today, Ithaka S+R issued a very informative report on academic library acquisition strategies for video and audio materials. This has been a slowly developing crisis prior to the pandemic, and emerged as a massive challenge in supporting the move to online instruction and research during the pandemic; CNI heard a great deal about these problems during our executive roundtables over the past few years. At the most basic level, it frames the profoundly destructive effects of a move from the commerce in objects (perhaps in conjunction with practices such as controlled digital lending) to a licensing regime for digital materials, and provides a very important parallel case study to the unfolding disaster of ebook licensing and libraries.

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Streaming Media Licensing and Purchasing Practices at Academic Libraries - Ithaka S+R

Researchers have undertaken several important efforts to track how libraries are approaching the streaming media market and troubleshoot the challenges they are encountering, focusing especially on strategies for balancing patron demand with managing costs. Building on those data gathering efforts, this report shares findings from the most comprehensive survey to date of academic library streaming media approaches at four-year institutions in the US and Canada. How do libraries approach the stre...

Clifford Lynch Director, CNI