In mid-March, The New York Times announced that it would make its premium online content, called Times Select, which includes columnists and archives going back to the 1800s, available to college students for free. The offer was part of an effort to lure young readers to the Gray Lady.

It seems there has since been a slight tweak to the offer, after librarians complained that they already pay tens of thousands of dollars for access to premium New York Times content through database companies like ProQuest, Lexis-Nexis, and so on.

Vivian Schiller, vice president and general manager of NYTimes.com, says that Times Select archives will be available only to students of colleges that subscribe to database companies that carry Times content. The change comes “out of respect and compliance with these agreements that we already have in place,” Ms. Schiller says.

At the moment, none of the pre-1980s archives is available to students for free. NYTimes.com is working on a patch that will recognize colleges that are subscribers to databases.

Barbara Fister, a library director at Gustavus Adolphus College who is a prominent voice among librarians online, was among the first to raise the issue on a couple of library discussion lists. Some respondents to her e-mails felt they had needlessly spent money on databases, she says. Others thought the databases offered a superior presentation for the same content. Still others couldn’t afford the databases and were glad the Times was giving away its content to students.

“I have mixed feelings,” she says. As someone who is an avid reader of newspapers and who worries about their future, she believes that the Times should make its online content free to students. Then again, she recently shelled out nearly $20,000 for Times archives in a ProQuest database — a real stretch for her small library. “Maybe I shouldn’t have paid so much,” she says.

Shortly after the Times announced its free offer to students in mid-March, Ms. Fister held a conference call with ProQuest officials who were “completely surprised” by the Times announcement, she says.

“It was pretty shocking when the news came out,” says Susan Whyte, director of the library at Linfield College, which had splurged for access to New York Times archives through ProQuest shortly before the Times’ free offer. She says she wonders whether her library will encounter a situation like this again in the near future. —Scott Carlson

Categories: Libraries, Research