Ann Shumelda Okerson has published "Reflections on Library Licensing" in Information Standards Quarterly.
Here's an excerpt:
The way libraries acquire basic content for their readers has been completely upended in the last two decades. In this rapid electronic environment, content providers are pressed to enhance and update existing products or to produce competitive new products, with ever-increasing functionality and with great uncertainty about what users will pay for and how much they will pay. At the same time, numerous new producers are entering the electronic marketplace. We are living in an information Wild West, which can put libraries and publishers face to face on Main Street at high noon, often without the third-party subscription agents or book jobbers we used to depend on. This article discusses how we got to this place; whether one should prefer copyright or license; the differing view of rights by authors, publishers, libraries and their end users; different types of licenses; and current issues in licensing.