Commercial Databases: Why Use Them?

Why not use them?

• Searching commercial databases costs money.
  • Sometimes, the costs can be substantial:
    • The cost of just accessing commercial databases can range from $0 to hundreds of dollars per hour to search.
    • Displaying, downloading, or ordering full-text records can cost from $0.15/each to $15 or more/each.
  • Why should one pay the money when one can:
    • Go to the library and, maybe, find the information for free?
    • Possibly find the information on the Internet/WWW for free?
• Learning to search commercial databases effectively can take substantial time
  • Why should one pay the money when one can:
• Everything's on the Internet
  • There is more-and-more information on the Internet. Billions of Web pages. Other files unnumbered. Why pay money for information you can get for free..

Why use them? Money is everything; money isn't everything

• Sometimes the information is only available in online databases.
  • Many marketing databases containing information on potential customers are only in electronic form.
• Sometimes the information is only economically accessible in online form.
  • It often would cost the customer a lot of money to accumulate the same information from other sources.
• Online databases save substantial search time and, thus, effort and/or money.
  • The time to accumulate many kinds of information can be substantial and, thus, may involve the expenditure of a lot of money.
  • Single sources of a wide variety of information can save a lot of search effort and time.
• Online databases save time when critical issues are involved.
  • Sometimes you need the information immediately (Legal, medical, investment fields come to mind) to address time-critical problems.
• The Internet has a lot of crap and you have to be careful when trying to get quality information.
  • You are much more sure of getting quality information when you use a commercial database because the articles and other data have usually gone through an editing and, even, peer-review process before being published in hardcopy.
  • Because of the huge amount of personal and commercial sites on the Internet, it is much more difficult to find and sort out the quality information than in commercial databases..

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