Course Packs. A collection or compilation of printed materials (e.g. book chapters, journal articles) assembled by members of staff of the Licensee for use by students in a class for the purposes of instruction.
Comment: If you want to use the database to create course packs, it is good to address and define them in the agreement.
Electronic Reserve. Electronic copies of materials (e.g. book chapters, journal articles) made and stored on the Secure Network by the Licensee for use by students in connection with specific courses of instruction offered by the Licensee to its students.
Comment: This is a fair definition. Electronic reserves are an important function for licensed databases in academic institutions. Watch for limits on how much content can be placed in electronic reserves and how long the content can be retained.
Secure Network. A network (whether a standalone network or a virtual network within the Internet) which is only accessible to Authorized Users approved by the Licensee whose identity is authenticated at the time of log-in and periodically thereafter consistent with current best practice, and whose conduct is subject to regulation by the Licensee.
Comment: Different vendors have different requirements for how access is technologically mediated. Make sure you understand how your institution’s systems work or bring your information technology department into the loop for database licenses.
Text Mining. A machine process by which information may be derived by identifying patterns and trends within natural language through text categorization, statistical pattern recognition, concept or sentiment extraction, and the association of natural language with indexing terms.
Comment: Text mining is when computers crunch through large datasets of text to find patterns. For example, a researcher could load a dataset containing multiple years of a major newspaper and search it find out when certain words became popular or what were the top news topics at various times. Or librarians could load a huge set of journal articles into a computer and perform citation analyses to discover how theories spread through a scholarly discipline. Vendors generally want to make special arrangements for text mining projects for at least. two reasons. First, these projects generally require having a complete digital copy of a large number of copyright-protected works, many more than a normal researcher would need to access. Second, the automated computer programs that
