While many electronic periodicals indexes are now available for self service on CD-ROM or even over the Internet, many are still accessible only from specified online vendors for a fee and may require a librarian to do the searching. Such vendors include Dialog, EPIC, and Dow Jones News Retrieval.
Some information is still available only from online database vendors.
Dow Jones News Retrieval includes full-text access to over 3,000 trade magazines and regional business magazines and newsletters. Online services offer searching across many databases simul-taneously. The search language provided by online vendors is frequently more effective than those found on CD-ROM, although the gap is narrowing. Collaboration with a librarian often produces better search results than a patron can accomplish alone. The library subsidizes search costs, with the subsidy varying according to the cost of the databases searched.