By James Speed Hensinger

Britannica will treat January 1997 as a free trial month for libraries participating in the BCR group purchase. This means that participating libraries will receive 13 months of access to Britannica Online for the price of 12 months, and that any billing from BCR will be postponed until early March. We hope this delay won't be a problem. Please notify Jim Hensinger, manager of BCR's Internet & Database Services, immediately if you need billing sooner.

Forty-four libraries are currently participating in Britannica Online via the BCR group. If the 44 libraries had purchased their access directly from Britannica, they would have paid a total of $79,685 more than they are paying now through BCR. To join, contact Jim Hensinger at jhensing@bcr.org.

Please spread the word about this money-saving opportunity to other academic libraries with which you have contact in BCR's six states (Colorado, Iowa, Kansas, Nevada, Utah and Wyoming). The more libraries involved in the group purchase, the more likely we are to see a further price reduction next year. Libraries may join at any time of the year and have their access fee pro-rated for the remainder of the contract.

If an academic library is already a Britannica Online subscriber, either directly or through a group and is in a member state, it may move its subscription to the BCR group. The library will receive a pro-rated credit towards its participation in the BCR contract for any amounts the library prepaid to Britannica for the unused part of its existing contract.

The 1997 BCR group contract annual price is 53-cents per FTE for full, unlimited access to Britannica Online.

BCR has set up a listserv, BCR-BRIT, to communicate easily and directly with libraries involved in the group purchase. To join, send the message subscribe bcr-brit to majordomo@bcr.org. Send messages to the address bcr-brit@bcr.org.