Reference at Newman Library

Year: 2009

Today’s Workshop

Today’s workshop, “Database Survival: Better Searching Techniques,” brought out a large crowd of students.  The session was part of the library’s Workshops in 30 series.

Prof. Hensley teaching "Database Survival"
Prof. Hensley teaching "Database Survival"

The Market for Organic Baby Food

I know several of us have helped one or more of the teams who are researching the organic baby foods market.  I thought I would share a few of the more unusual sources that I found.

The USDA just published a report on Marketing U.S. Organic Foods. Charts and graphs from the report can be found here. It doesn’t include data on baby foods but has a good survey of who buys organic foods and how much organics cost.

The Economic Research Service of the USDA has a website devoted to Organic Agriculture. It points to a working paper on the demand for organic baby foods published in 2001 and this lead me to a database called AgEcon at the University of  Minnesota.  A search on organic baby foods there found four reports, the latest from 2009.

Finding Institutional Investor Information for a non-American Company

A patron was looking for institutional investor information about a publicly traded company based in Hong Kong.

After searching in vain using databases such as S&P, Hoover’s, Mergent and even Thomson One I consulted with a colleague.

Linda E. suggested checking Thomson Financial, where we were actually able to find annual reports for the company going back in time.

I referred the patron to the Subotnik Financial Services Center to have a look in Reuters 3000 and Bloomberg Professional.

Out of curiosity, this afternoon Harold and I took a walk downstairs to have a look to see what we could find about it with our own eyes. Sure enough we found more information. Reuters 3000 and Bloomberg Professional allowed us to look at the latest quarterly holdings of the company’s institutional investors.

It turns out the particular company is also in fact traded here in the US, but only on the OTC pink sheet market.

This was a lesson to me that there is a lack of coverage for international companies and pink sheet listed companies in some of our library databases and that both Reuters 3000 and Bloomberg Professional are a good resources for this type of information.

Many thanks to Linda E. and Harold!

Advertisers and Agencies Online

Advertisers and Agencies Online/Redbooks are in the process of upgrading their site so you may encounter problems accessing it until the full upgrade is up.

Connecting via our Database page, you will get the main page for Advertising Redbooks. If on the top right hand corner it says “Welcome Guest” click on “Sign On” right next to it.

If you get a page that has a username/password login box in the center, look further down where it says “IP and Portal page customers: Use on Site Access page” and click on “site access”.

This should take you to the database. Please do log-out after use, and do let me know if you experience any issues.

MarketResearch.com. What does it cover?

I have been using the MarketResearch.com database a lot lately and yesterday I sat down and looked into the companies that contribute market research reports to the MarketResearch.com Academic product that we subscribe to.The four contributors cover distinctly different industry sectors.

Packaged Facts covers food, beverages, household goods and consumer products.  They also publish reports on consumer market segments like Latinas, baby boomers, and Do-It-Yourself-ers.

Simba focuses on publishing, media and related technology sectors.  They have several current reports on the market for textbooks.

Kalorama publishes research on medical devices, pharmaceuticals and related biotech and life sciences fields.

SBI’s research is focused on enery, power and construction-related products like pumps, lights, doors, and furniture.

I didn’t mention the Icon Group reports which cover world markets.  You can find out more about this firm in the wikipedia article on its founder, Philip M. Parker.

Sage journals in database page

As you may remember, the Sage Collections went away in July. We have updated our Serials listing and so I have removed the individuals Sage collections from our list of databases, leaving just a Sage journals entry. We now have access to over 500 titles: titles that had been included in our collections have access back to v.1, new titles have access back to 1999.