Visit from a database salesman today. Actually a rep from one which we already subscribe to just checking up on us. Took him about 10 minutes and then he clicked that he'd met me at TheOldPlace. I had to be impressed that he managed to make the connection with no help from myself. Still, I guess being good peoplewise like that is what they're paid for.

I'm never quite sure what to make of such meetings but this one was particularly useful to our surprise (I met him along with our technical services guru who sorts the budgets etc). As we reviewed what we take, bells began to ring in the guru's head as he realized we had separate electronic subscriptions to some of the documents that were included in this large technical database. As time went on we uncovered several places where there were duplications. It soon began to add up. Maybe $3000 worth or more. So definitely worth the time spent.

I'm not sure I want to ask how long that overlap's been going on. (All my fears about the difficulty of managing electronic resources were raised.) But it was hugely encouraging to see the usage stats for the database. (Bizarrely we have no access to these and can only get them by asking the rep for them). However, even he was impressed with the use we make which is on a level with the larger commercial companies that use the service.

Makes a change from worrying about whether the huge cost of some "vital" databases can be justified when the students (and academics) seem to make so little use of them. They don't want indexing databases pointing to things that may be in the library or might take three days to get via inter-library loan; they want full-text and they want it now.