Week 6 Business Resources

Sunday, November 4, 2012

Perhaps one of our most underserved populations is the business sector. According to the Small Business Administration there are approximately 35,000 small businesses and 120,000 self-employed people in Maine, generating nearly $3.5 billion in revenues and employing more than 500,000 people. With the current economic climate, a library can be an invaluable resource for businesses, helping business owners keep abreast of current trends and future opportunities.

MARVEL has a number of interfaces that can help business people navigate the ins and outs of good business practices. This is where they can find news articles, information about competitors and prospects, and general business advice. MARVEL provides a quick link to several business resources: Academic Search Complete, Business and Company Resource Center, Business Source Complete, EconLit, Regional Business News, Value Line Investment Survey (public library and academic library editions), and Wall Street Journal. Each platform offers a number of options and with good guidance from a librarian well-versed in using these resources; business men and women will be most appreciative of the service we offer them.  All of these resources can be accessed via the alphabetical list or the subject list on the MARVEL!  homepage.

The first interface, Academic Search Complete, is part of the EBSCOHost family of databases and will be covered in Lesson 10.

Business Source Complete indexes and abstracts more than 4,800 scholarly, trade, popular, and special interest serials in the fields of business and industry. More than half of the publications are peer-reviewed, and approximately 3,700 provide full text. Additional full-text, non-journal content includes financial data, books, monographs, major reference works, conference proceedings, case studies, investment research reports, industry reports, market research reports, country reports, company profiles, SWOT analyses, faculty seminars (videos), and more. Updated daily.

Discovery Exercise:
In your blog, post your findings and observations regarding the following:
1. Do a search for available information on FM radio. Pay attention to the types of sources found.
2. Look for the visual search option and try it. Does it make searching easier or harder?

EconLit contains economic literature including accounting, capital markets, econometrics, economic forecasting, government regulations, labor economics, monetary theory, and urban economics.

Discovery Exercise:
In your blog post your findings and observations regarding the following:
1. Complete a search to find resources for small business owners.
2. Complete a search for items that pertain to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and small businesses.
3.Complete a search for items that pertain to tax policy and small businesses.

Regional Business News is a collection of news information from all over the world. Information provided by these sources covers business, political, economic and other diverse, international news events. This resource contains the most recent 30 days of information from each of these wire sources. Several hundred articles are added to the Regional Business News database each day.

Discovery Exercise:
In your blog, post your findings and observations regarding the following:
1. Pick a nationally known company. Search under the company’s name and look at the results.
2. Narrow the regional search to something more appropriate for this area of the country.
3. Choose a Maine company to see what information is available about either the company or its industry.

There are two Value Line formats available through MARVEL. Value Line Investment Survey for public libraries provides independent investment information, analyzing over 1,700 stocks. The Rating & Reports section details the history, current status, and projected performance of individual stocks. It covers the current three months, updated weekly on Friday afternoons. (Note: Many of Value Line’s products are listed on their site, but not accessible under this license. They are indicated by a gray lock.) The number of users at a time is 6 for the entire state so you may have to try several times to access this resource.  If you have no luck after a couple of attempts, just indicated that in your blog.

Unless you have a good background in business or stocks, much of the information contained in Value Line may look like Greek to you. The goal of this exercise is not to understand the information contained in the reports, but to be able to navigate through the database to help a patron find the information they are looking for.

Value Line Research Center for academic libraries covers stocks, mutual funds, options and convertible securities as well as special situation stocks. This is available only to academic libraries and is also restricted to 6 concurrent users.

Discovery Exercise:
In your blog, post your findings and observations regarding the following:
1. Look at the current issue of Value Line. Explore the various links for the “Investment Survey,” which is the primary tool available to public library users. Start with “Description,” which gives a good description of the site.
2. Look at the various reports offered: Ratings and Reports, Selection and Opinion, Summary and Index, etc. Familiarize yourself with the information contained in each report and how they differ.
3. Pick a well-known stock such as Starbucks, General Motors, Apple, etc., and do a company search using either the general search box at the top of the page or “company look up.” Familiarize yourself with the type of information provided by linking to the various tabs at the top of the report. Also look to see if there is a “full research report” available for the company.

Wall Street Journal provides indexing to and full text coverage of the nation’s leading business daily from 1984.

Discovery Exercise:
In your blog, post your findings and observations regarding the following:
1. Using the advance search feature, look for articles on small business and health care.
2. Look at how the results are returned and the suggested limiters offered by the site. What might a small business person be interested in?
3. Familiarize yourself with the options available to follow up on your search, such as creating alerts.

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