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..