Lesson 8: Cost of Online Searching

Objectives: Understand the variety of charges associated with searching, know how to find the costs incurred in a session, and know how to find information about the costs of using a certain file.

Topics:

Viewing incurred costs - DISPLAY COST
Setting detail on breakdown of costs - SET COST
Finding charges in file - HELP COST

References: STN International Price List for the current year

There are many advantages to searching for information online rather than in the library stacks. However, online searching does have certain costs associated with it. The purpose of this section is to present background information on the full costs of online searching.

Although academic discounts are available, they are not discussed here or shown in any of the examples.

Types of Costs

Costs on STN International are of three types:

Connect hour charges: You are charged a certain fee per minute while you are in a file.
Display charges: These are charges for each record displayed. The fee varies depending on how much data you display.
Search term charges: In some files there are also charges for each term you search.
Telecommunication charges: Telecommunication services such as Compuserve, Tymnet, etc. will also have charges associated with their use. The costs of an internal network or Internet may be transparent to you.

Viewing Online Cost Information

Enter D COST at any time to see the charges that have been incurred in that session. In this example connect hour charges were $9.72 in the session, search term charges were $3.15 for the session, and display charges were $0.20 for the session. Telecommunications charges were $0.58.

=> D COST
COST IN U.S. DOLLARS                             SINCE FILE      TOTAL
                                                      ENTRY    SESSION
CONNECT CHARGES                                        9.57       9.72
NETWORK CHARGES                                        0.36       0.58
SEARCH CHARGES                                         3.15       3.15
DISPLAY CHARGES                                        0.20       0.20
                                                    -------    -------
FULL ESTIMATED COST                                   13.28      13.65

IN FILE 'CA' AT 07:54:40 ON 21 FEB 94

Costs are also automatically displayed when you change files and logoff.

SET COST may be used to vary the amount of detail displayed about the costs. Enter SET COST FULL to see the greatest amount of detail.

Enter D COST FULL to see full cost details.

Help Cost

Costs vary by file. To see the current cost information for a file, enter HELP COST at an arrow prompt in the file. HELP COST shows the full cost for an online session. Discounts are not shown.

The following example shows partial HELP COST message for the CA file. Notice that different display formats have different charges.

=> FILE CA

=> HELP COST


 STN International Fees and Prices Effective January 1, 1997


 CA File                                  U.S.
 -------                               Dollars
                                       -------
 Connect Hour Fee (per hour) .           32.00

 Search Fees
  Search Terms . . . . . . . .            1.21
  SDI Search Fee . . . . . . .            6.80

 Format Display and Print Fees (per answer)
  CAN. . . . . . . . . . . . .            0.13
  BIB or CBIB or STD . . . . .            0.69
  ABS (CA subscriber). . . . .            0.54
      (non-subscriber) . . . .            1.00
  ALL (CA Subscriber). . . . .            1.45
      (non-subscriber) . . . .            1.91
  SAM or IND . . . . . . . . .            0.22
  HIT or KWIC. . . . . . . . . Variable, depending on displayed fields
  OCC. . . . . . . . . . . . .            FREE

 DISPLAY SCAN. . . . . . . . .            FREE
                              o
                              o
                              o

Return To Table of Contents