Often, licensing terms are negotiated separately from business terms, which is not optimal. As a result, many library professionals only have experience negotiating one part of the agreement. In this workshop, participants will gain experience analyzing the entirety of a proposed deal. They will be evaluating the license and the business terms, including looking at internal library data and vendor data. Participants will then bring both analyses together and work collaboratively to prepare a negotiation strategy, following the best practices of principled negotiations. Planning the negotiation strategy will include identifying interests for both the library and the vendor, identifying possible concessions and when to use them, and developing a counteroffer. The workshop will conclude with a fish-bowl activity showcasing a short negotiation putting the strategy into practice followed by group discussion.
This workshop builds upon work previously presented by one of the presenters as a workshop at ER&L 2020, Negotiate like an MBA. The materials of this prior workshop have been greatly expanded and are freely available as part of the Foundations curriculum of The ONEAL Project (Open Negotiation Education for Academic Libraries), which was funded by an IMLS Laura Bush 21st Century Librarian Program grant. Participating in this new workshop will provide hands-on, collaborative experience with putting concepts introduced by ONEAL into practice.
Learn more:
Following the workshop, participants will be able to:
- understand how to approach analyzing a licensing contract.
- analyze library and vendor data to evaluate business terms.
- develop a negotiation strategy that considers licensing and business terms.
AUDIENCE LEVEL: Beginner
PARTICIPATION: The instructors will engage the audience in multiple ways including short lecture, small group activities, larger group discussion, and a fish-bowl activity where a participant will negotiate against one of the instructors using a strategy developed by the workshop participants. Participants will be encouraged to bring laptops so they may follow along when doing analysis with data.
Meet Your Course Instructors
Katharine V. Macy
Project Director/Principal Investigator of the ONEAL Project. Interim Associate Dean of Scholarly Communication & Content Strategies at Indiana University – Indianapolis. A thought leader in library negotiations that has been writing and presenting on how libraries can create relative bargaining power in vendor negotiations as well as providing negotiation education to academic libraries. This work includes providing the Negotiate Like an MBA workshop in-person and virtually for ER&L and developing the Negotiation 101 and 201 series sponsored by ACRL and SPARC.
Scarlet Galvan
Co-Principal Investigator of the ONEAL Project. Scarlet is Collection Strategist for the University of Chicago, where she develops and leads efforts toward an equity-centered, sustainable collection. Her research focuses on the sociopolitical aspects of library services platforms.
Courtney Fuson
Co-Principal Investigator of the ONEAL Project. Asset Management Librarian and Subject Liaison to Education at Belmont University. She has been focused on assessment of database subscriptions for the last several years, and has worked closely with her statewide library consortium, Tenn-Share, and the Tennessee Library Association on a variety of projects, including continuing education for librarians.