Week 6: Business Resources

Business resources, wooo!  Honestly, this is not something I've ever looked at too closely, considering I am not a business owner myself and most of my experience at the library has been with children, who generally aren't looking for business tips (but may surprise me!)  Anyway, onto the Discovery Exercises.

Business Source Complete:  This comes up with an EBSCOhost screen, so I feel like I should be pretty good at navigating it.  I consider EBSCO to be my specialty.  Or, I thought I would be.  Apparently no information was found searching for FM radio, but they did turn on SmartSearch results for me.  Why, thank you EBSCO.  I see that trade publications, academic journals, magazines, newspapers, product reviews and market research reports are available as sources.  The Visual Search feature is okay but not my favorite.  I wonder if that is because I'm too attached to traditional search methods though.  It is pretty though.

EconLit looks like an EBSCO database too (so why are we skipping Academic Search Complete?  I'm confused).  Fun fact: I took many economics courses in college, yet I remember little of it now.  Sorry Professor Bartlett.  I know you tried.  My initial instinct is that this would not be my first choice of resource to use with small business owners, because to me, EconLit sounds like it deals more with broader economic interests, rather than something the average small business owner.  I wasn't that impressed with the results of searching for "resources for small business owners."  It's nice to see that there are lots of different types of resources though, including working papers.  I did a search for EPA and small business and only got one result, which I'm not sure will be too relevant for our owners ("Land Recycling, Community Revitalization and Distributive Politics: An Analysis of EPA Brownfields Program Support.")  I had slightly more success with tax policy, although the second article was in Japanese.  Maybe my search skills are rusty, but I think this one might be better for people more interested in broader economic issues rather than the nitty-gritty everyday realities of running a small business.

Regional Business News:  I'm supposed to pick a nationally known company.  I'm going to try "Banana Republic" because I flitted across a "Mad Men" picture earlier and I know they have a collection of clothes based on the show. (A collection of clothes, I will let you know, I would be more than happy to have, should anyone feel like treating me :) ).  Anyway, the first few results actually do have something to do with the company (and the Mad Men collection even--Score!) but after that it starts talking about 'banana-republic tax schemes', which isn't really about clothing.  I was able to find two articles that had both Maine and Banana Republic in them, but they were more about parts of Maine that don't have designer retail stores.  There were plenty of articles about Banana Republic and New York, which makes sense to me.  As for a local Maine business, I decided to cheat a little and look up "Linda Bean",  as she is sort of a polarizing figure in my neck of the woods.  I found articles about her restaurants and about her politics.  I found this one to be one of the easiest to use, and may use it to look up information about companies in the future.

ValueLine:  Wow, I got in!  I am amazed, and a little afraid to be taking up one of six valuable slots for this resource that I probably will not understand. After looking at it though, it wasn't as bad as I thought.  A lot of stock information, that's all.  One of the reports give the value of each company, as well as alerts to whether or not the company is doing well.  I looked at a few different companies: The Gap, Chipotle, Best Buy, and DSW to see how they were doing.  The Std. R & R Supplementary feature had information about companies in more detail, which I liked.  I'm not sure I would use it a lot, but I can see why it is popular with others and a highly valued resource.

Wall Street Journal:  Our patrons bring us the book section of the Wall Street Journal on a regular basis, so I'm sure they would love this!  On the subject of health care, I'm sure that the small business owner would be very much interested in the cost of health care.  I could see it being useful for them to set up alerts on whatever field their small business was in.  I might set up a few myself.