We had a rep from a major database vendor come and talk to us all afternoon on Friday. All I can say is, I feel like I’ve just been window shopping at Prada. I don’t know anything about our budget, but I’m pretty sure we saw enough wonderful databases and full text collections to blow our entire database budget several times over. Of course, it was all beyond wonderful… but wow… I think we all got database envy for at least two of the tools we saw.
Anyway, at one point the poor guy was showing us a free add-on to something we already have. Free. Got that? Well, we spent probably 20 minutes grilling him on how it works, why they made it, what it would do for us that another product we have doesn’t do, why they made it work the way they did rather than another way, and discussing our theory of student usage of databases… All for a free add-on. The poor guy.