The economic challengers in higher education and healthcare coupled with continuing budget concerns have libraries, publishers and vendors making strategic changes as they seek to provide a high-level of services at a time when uncertainty continues to dominate planning and development. Creative thinking has become the norm as organizations seek to challenge long-held views and uncover and implement needed changes. Librarians, publishers, and vendors have all experienced a period of assessment, strategic review and reaction as a result of the continued evolution from a print-based model to one dominated by electronic dissemination of scholarly information and the new role eBooks promise to play. This presentation addresses some of the important actions taken by librarians, publishers and vendors to cope with changes forced by both the economy and budget pressures, by the continued migration of scholarly resources to electronic formats and by current and planned eBook activities and new eBooks models. It explores patterns in library content selection and spending trends, publisher prices and pricing models, as well as vendor strategies and tactics challenging and changing times. Data to be presented is the result of customer research conducted by EBSCO within the last six months.
