Thinking about Business

I think I should stop leaving these assignments for the end of the work day.  But it's too late now...

Business Source Complete looks like any of the other Ebsco databases in MARVEL and I'm pretty familiar with them.  The search for FM radio brought up a lot of information.  It's interesting that you can find market research reports which are usually (I thought) hard to find, at least for free.  But these are old, 2004 and earlier and some aren't really what I would call market research.  The articles under the type of "product review" are good, also. 

I tried the visual search option and, perhaps because of my age and comfort zone, did not like it too much.  I'd like to know what others thought (and their ages!).

Using EconLit for the various searches, I learned that the SmartText option helps to garner a few extra citations when you aren't coming up with much.  This got a few additional citations when searching for small business and the EPA.  This database is much more academically or scholarly oriented; it includes dissertations, research articles, working papers.  I would want to be careful about who I recommended it to.

I can see how the Regional Business News would be a useful database.  I searched for Apple and found 30,000+ items, most of them from the news wires.  Then I searched for the Jackson Laboratory and found 27 items.  It was interesting in that about one-third were obits for people who were on the JKL board.  I wouldn't have thought of that.  But this search picked up a lot about the lab and what's happening with it, not only in ME, but also in FL and CT, areas where expansion is/was in the works or is being considered.

Value Line:  I was, at one time, the "business librarian" at Fogler and I remember the gazillions of questions from the business students about Value Line.  So I'm always amazed that we have access to it via MARVEL.  It is an amazing resource and worth learning...when you have a lot of time... I used the public library version and think this could be quite confusing to someone who had never seen the print version.  I looked at the 4 pdfs listed for this week and I found some of them confusing.  The index lists page numbers for companies, but I couldn't find all of those pages in the pdfs.  Then I did a search by putting Tim Hortons in the search box and found a number of articles.  In the first one, I clicked on the stock symbol to get the one-page summary of financial data.  On the article, there was a button offering the full research report; however, clicking on it led to a request for a full subscription at a cost of $598.  I assume the academic version of Value Line would let you have the full report.

All in all, I'm glad I don't have to navigate and understand Value Line.  I think I would assign one person the job of delving into this database and refer all questions to him/her. 

I use the Wall Street Journal quite a bit because administrators often hear about a story in the WSJ and want the full text.  It is another huge benefit of MARVEL to my library.  I limited the search on small business and health care reform to health care policy because I think owners of small businesses would be interested in reading about how the ACA is going to affect them.  Then I changed the display so that the most recent articles (rather than relevancy) were listed first and there were a number of useful items.  Someone could set an an alert so that new articles on this topic would be emailed to them each week/month/whatever.  I'm late in getting to this assignment so I know that Obama won the election, but if I had done it when it came out, the election would not have happened yet and the alert would be even more meaningful.

Phew...this was a LONG assignment!