For any national bibliographic service it is vital to understand the costs and the potential market but it is particularly important if the service is to be supported in whole or part by charges. Differential pricing structures can ensure that access for schools and those less able to pay, such as students, the unwaged, is subsidised by those better able to afford it. New technology offers opportunities to reduce production and distribution costs by migration of the national bibliography from older printed, fiche or CD-ROM formats to the Web

NBAs must therefore:

  • Create an affordable service portfolio
  • Control their costs rigorously
  • Seek opportunities to deliver services using the most efficient technologies
  • Ensure that priced products and services do genuinely recover direct costs
  • Discontinue services and products that fail to return a profit.

A range of services and products can be offered under the national bibliography brand, e.g.:

  • Machine-readable current bibliographic records for clients such as bibliographic utilities, libraries and booksellers
  • Copies of the national bibliography in any physical format via annual subscriptions
  • Bibliographic records for retrospective conversion purposes
  • Value-added services, e.g. current awareness data; statistics or subsets tailored to specific user profiles