Direct costs
Direct costs could include:
- Telecommunications charges
- Fees for subscription sites
- Charges to download particular documents
- "Pay-per-view" costs for commercial sites
Telecommunications charges will have been paid by your library service. They represent a fixed overhead and so you do not need to try to calculate them for any search.
Where a library service, has decided to subscribe to a particular information source, there will be good reasons for this. A knowledgeable person has decided that the subscription site provides better information than is available on free sites. Indeed the subscription service may provide the only information available. You should therefore familiarise yourself with the content of subscription sites and their charging structures.
Downloading and pay-per-view charges can mount up. Before using such information, always consider if there is an appropriate alternative source which is free of charge. An interesting article on the development of "pay for content" Internet provision is found at
http://www.demonatthus.net/news/n-a030407a.html
To see some examples of commercial information services for which there is a fee, look at
http://about.reuters.com/productinfo/index.aspx This is a good example of a commercial site, providing financial and economic information for which some people are prepared to pay.
Another cost which can be considerable relates to printing and/or copying the search results. This can be minimised if you supply the results to the client in electronic format wherever possible.
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