"Real-World" Products and Academic Decisions.

This article offers a look at campus-only marketing of information products and services. One of the ways an information product must prove its worth is to have a life after, to constitute a real world product. When students go for job interviews and the interviewers ask them what skills they might bring, commenting on their ability to search effectively online would have more impact of the databases they name are ones the interviewers have heard of or might wish they had heard of. Vendors who offer no off-campus routes to their information seem to contradict any claims for their data's importance. If the information is so good, so vital, so essential, so deserving of the academic librarians' attention and expenditure, then it should be good enough for a post-graduation afterlife. Bottom line, academic databases are curricular tools. No one expects term papers or other curricular exercises to provide precedent-shattering original research. For undergraduate programs, academic librarians want the databases they license to teach students how to search well, how to evaluate content, how to know when to reach beyond the open Web and when to stay within it, in essence, how all kinds of information can serve them in their future lives.