Business Resources

I did the Hobbies and Crafts blog on the Sunday it was assigned because I knew it would be fun.  I'm doing this blog on a Sunday because I want to get it over with.  I may have a degree in Accounting but all this business stuff is not my thing!!

To explore the Business and Company Resource Center I first had to realize it's called Business Insights: Essentials!  I looked up Ellsworth Builders Supply since I was the Controller at the company many years ago.  The information on the site was 10 years old so it would only have limited value for someone researching the company - did provide the basics of address and phone number along with the outdated information about company sales and number of employees.  The only article hit was for the death of the owner Austin Goodyear.  Competitors names didn't show any of the local companies in Maine that would actually be competitors but the search of the industry code for other building materials dealers showed some of the big national companies like Lowes and Home Depot.

A Business Source Complete search for FM radio brought up a wide variety of hits in trade publications, newspapers, academic journals, trade reports and magazines.  Putting the search in quotes narrowed the field by almost half.  The visual search could possibly be helpful if what you were looking for could be found easily by the choices offered to keep narrowing the field.  There was such a wide variety of hits that a person would have to be good at search terms, etc. to easily find what they were looking for.

When looking at EconLit I did the search for resources for small business owners. The subject section had a lot of choices for narrowing the field which could potentially be quite helpful and the visual search might work as well.  What seemed to be missing was any way to narrow by location so that would probably have to be added to an advanced search.  When I did the search for EPA and small businesses I got 31 articles but when I added Maine as a subject there were 0 hits.  This type of search might also be helped by changing the publication date range if only current information is needed.

I searched for Wal-Mart in Regional Business News and got 8936 hits.  If I narrowed it by location to the United States and the New York Times it went down to 320.  For that company I couldn't find a way to narrow it to anything specifically in Maine.  I did get a kick out of the fact that you can listen to the Radio and TV news transcripts in either an American accent, British accent, or Australian accent and you can change the language you read them in.  It even highlights each word as it's read so that feature could actually be helpful for someone struggling with reading or learning English!
I tried a couple of Maine companies with very little luck - did manage to get a few newspaper hits for Jackson Laboratory - had to add a NOT to the advanced search to eliminate obituaries!
Nice tool bar on the right hand side for printing, emailing, saving, etc.

Value Line Investment Survey certainly has a lot of information available for anyone who wants to keep an eye on their stocks or learn about investing.  The Investment Education section has some great lessons and explanations of how the site works, what the numbers on the stock reports mean, etc. A person would definitely have to spend some time in this site to really understand it or at least know a whole lot more about investing than I do. But it is good to have looked it over and have an idea of what is available.

On the Wall Street Journal site, a search for small business and health care brought back 19638 results.  Using the suggested limiters I chose small business again and it narrowed it to 493 results.  Going back to the original results and limiting it to Maine, there were only 10 hits.  There were a lot of choices  for the limiters, subject, location, company, time frame, etc. that should help anyone narrow their choices down to a reasonable number to search through.   The only thing that I found a bit frustrating in the limiters section is that they sort by number of hits for the subject or by publication date so you have to look through them all to find something specific like "Maine" Alert and save features were easy to find -I didn't set up an alert but did click on the link and the form looked pretty easy to fill out.

Working in a small rural library I have had pretty much no one ask for the type of information that was covered in this exercise but at least now if they come I'll be a little more prepared to help them!!  Unlike some of the other parts of Marvel that we've explored, these resources don't seem quite as intuitive to use and are definitely more intimidating!!