Miskatonic University PressWhere I work, at York University Libraries, we’ve got a new web page up: vendor policies. It’s a big long list of everyone electronic resource that we subscribe to, with links (where known) to the vendor’s privacy policy and terms and conditions of use, and a note about whether account creation is optional or mandatory. The data was collected by Stephanie Power and is available on GitHub under a CC-0 license.
There’s also a little script that generates the long HTML list, suitable for pasting into a content management system. The list isn’t pretty, but our goal was first to build a complete list so that all of these policies that affect our users are in one place. That’s done.
Our second goal is to tell other libraries about it. Perhaps this list is useful elsewhere, particularly in Ontario, where the academic libraries share a lot of online resources? Right now it’s a list of what York has, and for other libraries to use it we’d need to figure out a way of listing who has access to what, but maybe that’s just a matter of adding a column to the CSV.
If anyone’s interested in using the data or has ideas about improving it, please email me at wdenton@yorku.ca.