4. How much you will be willing to pay for the information? There may be a charge for reproducing magazine articles, for borrowing some books or microforms, for requesting books that are not on the shelf, or for conducting an online information search in your behalf. Ask what the library policy is, but try to gauge what your own financial limits are. The problem of paying for services has never been resolved in many public libraries. Because we usually refer to public libraries as “free” instead of tax-supported, many libraries will not provide some services if they have to charge. Thus, you may not be able to have online searches of expensive databases in those systems where all services are free but whose tax support is minimal.
