Business Resources

 Business Source Complete

1. Do a search for available information on FM radio. Pay attention to the types of sources found.

After doing this search on FM radio I found that there were a couple of academic journals and lots of periodical choices.

2. Look for the visual search option and try it. Does it make searching easier or harder? When I did the visual search it loaded in the Column Display Style, which I found very hard to navigate. I changed it to the Block Display Style and found it much more visually pleasing. I actually liked the Visual search much more than the list search I started with. It was easier to see because it put the title and date in block style for you. I thought it did not give an abstract, but when you clicked on the title, the abstract loads on the right. That is very helpful when you are researching because you can preview what its about first then you can decide if it is generally what you are looking for.

EconLit

1. Complete a search to find resources for small business owners.

I did this and I used the visual search, which was much easier to see the results graphically. This topic is very Greek to me so the results did not make a whole lot of sense, but I could see where business-minded people would use this search to find pertinent information for their own businesses.

2. Complete a search for items that pertain to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and small businesses. This only gave me 1 result and I am not certain how helpful it is for that particular topic.

3. Complete a search for items that pertain to tax policy and small businesses. There were a few results to look through on this topic. Again I found the visual search the best way to search. I grouped the results by publication, which allowed me to see where the information was coming from.

Regional Business News

1. Pick a nationally known company. Search under the company’s name and look at the results. I looked up Walmart. I got almost 9,000 results from news and periodical sources.

2. Narrow the regional search to something more appropriate for this area of the country. I added New England in the search box, had it search all terms and got results from Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Oregon, Maryland, etc. It searched for New and England and returned results that were from the New York Times.

3. Choose a Maine company to see what information is available about either the company or its industry. I searched BIW and returned 68 results. The results were from news, government documents, and periodicals. There were many articles updating the reader on things that were happening at BIW, and the governmental connections and opportunities with their business.

Value Line

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. This provides a great description of what Value Line can do for the consumer. It also gives a general overview of the stock reports they provide.

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.

The Ratings and Reports section gives information about 133 different companies. It offers the company’s name, the ticker for the company, the industry it belongs to, and the timeliness for each company. You can view these reports in either PDF or HTML version. The Selection and Opinion report is a PDF of the updates that have occurred during the week in the stock world. It gives you low risk options and advice on what stocks are worth purchasing and the overall ups and downs in the stock market. The Summary and Index report is a 40 page PDF that is an overall index to current stocks and their ratings, the timeliness ranks of each company, timely stocks, conservative stocks, stocks that are ranked 2, highest yielding stocks, biggest free flow cash generators, the widest discount from book value, etc for individual companies. The Standard Ratings and Report Cover Page is a 2 page index of where to find info on specific companies and it gives the National Income Series information for consumers. The Standard Ratings and Report Supplementary section supplements more detailed information about specific larger companies. 

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.

I chose Apple, which I found out in the stock world is called AAPL, and it had a full research report which was a one page PDF of detailed Apple stock and company information. The tabs were also very detailed. The Quotes tab revealed the current placement of Apple stock in the stock market. It gives prices and information stock buyers are in need of. The News tab gives the most recent business news about the company from many different business sources. The Option tab gives the most recent price for stocks to bid on or ask and when these prices will expire. The Graph tab, which was foreign to me, seemed to show the stock progress throughout the day. The Time/Sales tab shows 1 minute of bids and asking prices and the market it happened in.

WallStreet Journal

1. Using the advance search feature, look for articles on small business and health care. There were almost 20,000 results.

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? A small business person looking for health care information might limit their search by looking up small business and health care expenditures so they will understand the costs for providing this type of care. They also might limit it by looking up small business and health care policy so they can find out about health care policies that small business might adopt. Anther limit could be small business and health insurance so they can get an idea of what kinds of insurance small business offer their employees. A fourth limiter could be small business and health care to get a general overview of having insurance in a small business.

3. Familiarize yourself with the options available to follow up on your search, such as creating alerts. Yeah, creating an alert worked for me! It was easy to use and sends the information directly to my e-mail as it becomes available. I was able to name the alert whatever I wanted and could schedule it daily, weekly, monthly or yearly. Another option was RSS feed, which created a web address that I could visit to see new articles about my topic. Other options are to save my research on the ProQuest website, e-mail the research list to myself or someone else, print it, get the citing information or export/save it in another form (PDF, HTML, RTF, etc) to view it later.