2016 Charleston Library Conference

Business databases have a reputation for being expensive, having problematic licensing terms, and generally being a pain to work with. This reputation is particularly common among collection development and e-resources librarians in general libraries. In addition to affordability, issues can include licensing restrictions to specific campus populations and locations, requirements that users create personal accounts, severe download restrictions, not working with consortiums, and shutting down summer access to prevent usage by student interns. On the other hand, business vendors must design their products and licensing to work with many types of customers: corporations, government agencies, consultants, and academia. Their content is often very expensive to produce, and vendors sometimes have to license content from third-party providers that have their own pricing and licensing issues.

To help better understand why business databases can be challenging to work with, and to propose recommendations on how libraries and business vendors can best work together, a group of business librarians and business vendors will lead this lively lunch discussion. The librarians will represent both business libraries and general libraries, and will present case studies representing different types and sizes of campuses. The vendors will represent specialized business content publishers. Together we will discuss how business information is different, why business vendors behave differently, examples of challenges in working with business vendors, examples of challenges in working with libraries, and recommendations & best practices. We will invite audience participation throughout.