Would You Like a Database with That?, Or, The Phenomena of Database-with-Textbook and Database-Coursepack Offers

The commercialization of information, higher education, and libraries is a topic well-known to academic librarians and faculty. Professionals concerned about these issues are faced with a daily barrage of examples of this seemingly unstoppable trend. University presidents are more and more seen as fundraisers, as are provosts and department chairs. Notions of students as customers and students as products permeate dialogue. For academic librarians, there are questions about outsourcing (whether by plan or de facto), licensing rather than purchasing (again, whether by plan or de facto), and the perceived irrelevance of print materials to students who grew up in the information age and, thus, to some who teach them. These last three issues crash together in considerations of database-with-textbook and database-coursepack offers. This paper explores the phenomena of database-with-textbook and database-coursepack offers. Database-with-textbook offers provide faculty and students who are using a textbook from a particular publishing company access to an electronic database traditionally subscribed to by an academic library. Database-coursepack offers enable faculty to create online "coursepacks" generated from a vendor's electronic databases which students then purchase, just as they would purchase a printed coursepack at a local copy shop. In both cases, database vendors are re-purposing electronic database content and marketing it directly to faculty members – potentially removing librarians from discussions of the curricular integration of information resources, appropriate development of information literacy skills, and opportunities for classroom-library collaboration. On the other hand, such infusion of information resources into the curriculum may accomplish the learning outcomes envisioned by resource-based learning theorists. This paper discusses potential implications of these direct-to-faculty approaches, both positive implications and those that may be less so.Ope