Over the past few weeks, academic libraries have been awash in generous offers of temporary free access to electronic information resources that otherwise come with a sturdy price.  The complications are real:  Can we hear on the list from anyone who has or knows of good models for handling this shower of benevolence.

The complications are real.  First, there is little rhyme or reason or pattern to what is being offered.  Some single publishers are offering a short extract of their publications list, others make their entire collections available, still others are aggregators with thousands and thousands of titles.  Some offers are made to all; some are to specific institutions or specific consortia; others are to end-users only.  Some are for longer and others for shorter periods of time.  Second, it is difficult to know, without investing staff time, just what is contained in any given announced resource.  Third, promoting these resources usefully to faculty and students would require some curation time at least to determine who might be interested in what and to display the possibilities intelligibly (with their end dates, which may change and will need to be updated).  Fourth, there are numerous (and different) lists and places for announcements of such offerings.  Fifth, some of the purpose of making this material freely available may come from vendors that are hoping to entice users to some products they've not seen before and send those users back to their librarians insisting -- when the free period is over -- that we absolutely must subscribe to some of them -- at a moment when prospects of budget flexibility are evaporating and cancelations are looming.  

So my question is:  how do we balance the impulse to make known with the real costs of doing so?  At ASU, we have a "libguide" page listing resources we think possibly relevant to our users in alphabetical order:  a dog's breakfast of a list.  Our liaison librarians will call items they think highly relevant to faculty/discipline attention.  Is there a better way to handle this?

With thanks for any enlightenment,

Jim O'Donnell

ASU