SWETS, the legal library and subscriptions services company - it currently has about 39,000 journal titles in its catalogue - reports the following data after asking publishers of all sizes what their response was in pricing terms to shrinking library budgets. Roughly have the publishers will not increase their prices at all in 2010 and the remainder say prices will not increase by more than 5%. About 45% of publishers said they expected their sales revenues to decline next year and another 25% expected it to remain at current levels. By the following year - 2011 - the number of publishers predicting declining revenues has fallen to less than a quarter, while 42.5% were expecting revenues to grow by in the region of 5%.

* By way of a footnote, a consultant told us one reason why LexisNexis Axxia and Visualfiles may not have enjoyed the success they might have expected in the corporate sector is that the person responsible for legal library and subscription sales is frequently the same person who controls the inhouse counsel/legal department's IT budget - and they are feeling antagonistic towards LexisNexis because that company has increased some of its subscription rates.