Acquiring minds want to know: is full text half full or half empty?

Fulltext has become a more prevalent offering in electronic resources. In some cases the original publisher may produce material both in print and electronic form or in electronic form only, while maintaining control over the contents. In other cases, another party may obtain the rights from the publisher to republish the material in a composite database. In all of these cases, the resources may be marketed as having fulltext of information. However, folks who have examined fulltext resources in detail have discovered that there are definitely different varieties of fulltext.