Electronic commerce and the Scottish Cultural Resources Access Network
| Pages | 41-43 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/eb040761 |
| Date | 01 March 2000 |
| Published date | 01 March 2000 |
| Author | Bruce Royan |
| Subject Matter | Information & knowledge management |
Electronic commerce
and the Scottish
Cultural Resources
Access Network
by Bruce Royan,
Chief Executive, SCRAN
The SCRAN multimedia resource base has
been built with capital funding from the
National
Lottery,
but its future relies on
securing a revenue stream to support its
services. This article describes how SCRAN
has gone about building an e-commerce
service.
Introduction
The Scottish Cultural Resources Access Network
is building a massive online multimedia resource
base for the study and celebration of human history
and material culture. It is doing this by financing
the digitisation and interpretative documentation of
selected objects from the libraries, museums,
archives and built heritage of Scotland.1
SCRAN has benefited from start up capital of
some £15 million, half of it National Lottery
Funding from the Millennium Commission, the
rest matching funding from SCRAN's contribu-
tors.
SCRAN cannot expect grant-aid for its future
running costs, however, and has been taking steps
to raise sufficient revenue for it to be sustainable
by the time grant-aid ceases in September
2001.2
SCRAN is already gaining some revenue from
consultancy, facilities management and system
development, but it expects to earn the lion's share
of
its
income from exploitation of the IPR in its
resource base of hundreds of thousands of multi-
media records.3
SCRAN has initially tackled the educational site
licence market, offering unlimited access,
downloading and educational re-use facilities for a
fixed annual fee. Cost of
sale
is not a major
problem in this market, since the transaction value
is relatively high (up to £2,000 pa per individual
institution). Indeed, some licences are sold on a
consortium basis, the largest deal to date being
with the Joint Information Systems Committee
(JISC) to supply SCRAN access as part of the
DNER (Distributed National Electronic Resource).4
SCRAN is now preparing offerings in three further
areas;
low-cost licensing for personal private use
(SCRAN@home), commercial licensing of
indi-
vidual images, and sale of value-added products
derived from the resource base, such as CD-ROMs
and print publications. In these markets the take
from each sale is quite low (SCRAN@home sells
at £25 pa for example), and so cost of
sale
had to
be kept to the absolute minimum. What was
needed was an e-commerce service.
Payment systems
In the electronic world as much as in the real, it is
essential that any business should be able to take
payment from its customers with a minimum of
fuss.
Smart cards like Mondex5 require customers
to install specialised reading equipment.
Micropayment systems like MilliCent6 currently
require the pre-purchase of
credit.
SCRAN is
looking forward to a generation of Micropayment
systems that will allow customers to make unpre-
meditated purchases which can be paid for through
a customer's utility bills; one example to watch is
the Picopayment facility being developed by
Message Central.7 In the meantime, SCRAN has
concentrated its efforts on becoming a Credit Card
Merchant.
Card payment clearance
It would have been possible for SCRAN to accept
credit or debit card numbers via its web site and
process them offline as 'card not present' transac-
tions,
but SCRAN required a totally online
solution, where the card number is verified and the
funds transferred automatically.
It would have been possible to set up the SCRAN
shop on a general purpose e-commerce host such
as Demon Commerce8 which would handle all
aspects of SCRAN's trading including payment
clearance. But SCRAN wished to maintain control
of the process on its own site, delegating only the
payment clearance transaction
itself.
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