ABSTRACT
This chapter will not look at the current library materials price crisis from a political viewpoint, but rather from a data-gathering perspective. After making a trip in 1986 sponsored by the Nijhoff company specifically for the purpose of discovering sources for European price data, it was discouraging to realize that there was very little published data on European prices of use to academic libraries, but it was heartening to discover that there are possibilities for increasing the information available. Therefore, one of the first questions which should be addressed here is what data is available on the prices of European publications supplied to academic libraries? There are no academic price indexes for France, Italy, the Netherlands, and Spain. However, since a presentation made to a WESS discussion group in San Francisco in 1987 on the Nijhoff project, a number of significant developments have occurred:
