Northern Light Business Research Library: Is Less More?
Information Today covers the upcoming relaunch of its Web-plus-premium content service for institutional clients, targeted for 15 January. Priced well below offerings from LexisNexis, Dialog and Factiva, about half of NL's former premium content titles - about 1,900, according to InfoWorld - in addition to about 100 million business-focused Web pages. Northern Light certainly re-enters the arena for premium content with a great deal more focus for this particular product line, and its offering of a "business web" selection of relevant online content may prove to be a welcome simplification of the Web for professionals increasingly frustrated by the preponderance of irrelevant content found in consumer-oriented search engine results. It's a reasonable "walk before you run" approach for a company that's trying to leverage a small but enthusiastic following into a strong institutional showing, and its sharp-pencil pricing may make friends in quarters trying to hone down corporate content costs. Backed by solid search performance and a deep general-purpose taxonomy, Northern Light offers a kit that spans the space between the top-tier aggregators and other smaller content collections such as eBrary very comfortably for many smaller businesses and departmental operations. It's not the widest market niche to exploit, though, and their success is predicated largely on their ability to sell into a space increasingly dominated by portal providers locked in to their own search solutions and less supported by the infopro "friendlies" that can advocate for this kind of solution. Sometimes less is more, but it can also be not enough to make a difference.