Some vendors already include tutorials in their offerings. Why should librarians take the time to build any of their own?
The reason is simple: vendors are interested in selling products and so their tutorials tend to emphasize the sexy features of their products like My EBSCOHost. Librarians on the other hand are interested in educating people how to best use these products to find the information they need (i.e. information literacy). This means that the types of tutorials our users need when they are first learning about a project are different – and this is particularly important if students are unable – or unwilling – to come into the library due to preferences, time constraints (i.e. the library is not open when the student starts a paper after their kids are asleep) or distance contraints (i.e. Distance Education Students.
