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A year‐long study of free end‐user access to the Medline database (using the Grateful Med software) was undertaken in 1993. Twenty bio‐scientists from two UK universities were surveyed at the beginning and end of the year. Responses were viewed in the light of independent factors affecting user attitude and behaviour, such as familiarity with information technology and a perceived need for bibliographic data. Those concerning quality of data or the capability of the software were relatively few and these were assigned less importance than practical considerations such as the location of the PC linking the user to Medline and the quality of network connections. Most users used Grateful Med in a simplistic way—not venturing beyond keyword searching—although deficiencies in coverage or recall were protected against by recourse to other end‐user systems. Librarian‐mediated online and CDROM services have been superseded—for this group of users—by desktop end‐user services.

This article has been withdrawn as it was published elsewhere and accidentally duplicated. The original article can be seen here: 10.1108/01435129410772275. When citing the article, please cite: Yvette Tilson, (1994), “Income Generation and Pricing in Libraries”, Library Management, Vol. 15 Iss: 2, pp. 5 - 17.

Changing access. The scene for the session was set by a paper presented by Harry East of the Centre for Communication and Information Studies (CCIS), University of Westminster, UK, which had been co‐authored with his colleague Yvette Tilson. This brought together material from the past five years of a continuing study about information access within the academic sector. The sampling panel comprised the same 15 academic institutions throughout the 1988–92 survey period.

Reports on a survey of charging policies and practices in London‐based public, academic and special libraries and information services with the object of establishing which pricing mechanisms are in operation and which services are being provided at a fee. The pricing mechanism cited by most respondents was “what the market will bear” rather than a direct adherence to cost‐based prices. The majority of libraries of all types have formalized some sort of differential pricing scheme in relation to user type and type of usage. There is a high commitment in academic and public libraries to a basic free level of service. Regulatory charges are largely the domain of public and academic libraries. Services acting as candidates for the generation of income differ between library types, but are mostly concerned with products rather than ideas/advice. “Value‐added” work is largely conducted by special and academic libraries.