News and tips by and for staff providing reference services at the Newman Library, Baruch College (New York, NY).
Trial access to ProfitCents until August 31, 2014.
ProfitCents is a SageWorks product providing industry data, financial analysis, and benchmarking data for private companies. Provides access to 60 ratios and metrics from 1,400 U.S. and Canadian industries.
Login credentials must be provided to interested faculty. Please contact me if you have any questions. ryan.phillips (at) baruch.cuny.edu
We’ve had a couple incomplete logouts this semester which have led to other users not being able to login. To properly logout, select “Exit and Shutdown Comms Server” per the screenshot below. Please inform patrons using Datastream Advance at the reference desk. I’ll send an email to faculty as well w/r/t this information. Let me know if you have any questions.
Here are a few visually-rich web applications that allow access to world data that students often ask for. The data comes from CIA Factbook, the World Bank and OECD.
IBM has built an information dashboard based on of some of the data in the CIA World Factbook. Users can display data on a global scale or by individual country. Variables are limited to Population, Population Growth, Infant Mortality, Agricultural GDP, Industry GDP, Services GDP, Total GDP, GDP by Inhabitants and Inflation.
The display of the data is pretty neat. The dashboard allows users three primary ways to view the data via World Map, Treemap or OLAP (bar charts). It features a customizable legend and displays a 3D bar and radar charts on the left-hand side to display neighboring country data. There is also a global ranking scale on the left side.
This is the 2nd edition of the World Factbook Dashboard. For more information, check out IBM’s ILOG Blogger.
World Bank Data Dashboard
Compare the World Factbook Dashboard with the World Bank Data Dashboard. It’s not as flashy but the World Bank provides the bulk of their indicators and also allows users to download the data they’re viewing, display information in different languages and enables more traditional browsing for data items.
OECD eXplorer
The OECD eXplorer does a good job of marrying a flashy interface with comprehensive offerings of their data. There is a lot to play around with on OECD eXplorer and thus a bit of a learning curve; but, once you get the hang of it, customizing the data/visuals, selecting and downloading becomes pretty easy.
Note: I first read about these dashboards at the Information Aesthetics blog.
We received an email question this weekend from a patron looking for an Accounting Tutorial on Debits and Credits. This is not listed in our Tutorials & Guides, but is available in our Digital Media Library.