Week 6 Business Resources

I am still a week behind from being on vacation 3 weeks ago.  No outside meetings on the calendar this week so maybe I can catch up.  One of the advantages of being behind is reading other blogs and getting a feel for the assignment.  I have not spent any time in these data bases and have never been asked for information about them.  Several people have commented about not being able to access Value Line at home.

In Business Source Complete I searched FM radio and got results using SmartText searching.  Most of the articles seemed to be Academic Journals and Periodicals.  Limiting my search to full text cut the results down some, but limiting it to Scholarly Journals really limited the result.  I liked the Visual Seach,  it gave me a number of ideas on the direction I could take with my search.

I seached small business in EconLit.  Using advanced seach I searched for small buimess and then limited it by EPA and then by tax policy.  All of the results seemed to be old until I realized that the Publication date was set at 2002.  It took me a while to figure out how to change the search date.

Regional Business News had the publication date set from 1985 - 2005.  I seached for information on Great Northern Paper Company and had to limit my seach to Maine, I did not get any results.  I seached L L Bean and did fine some interesting articles.

I spent some time looking around Value Line.  I looked at all the reports and looked up several companies.  It was interesting to read about the history and prospects of the those companies.

I found the Wall Street Journal site the easiest to use.  I limited the seach to small business and health insurance.  I found articles going back to 1984 and again limited my search to the last three years. 

I have a learned about these databases and have a very small understanding of what information is available.  The lesson I really learned from this weeks exercises is that it is very hard to navigate and use a database when your knowledge of the content is so limited.  I can better understand the frustration that many of our partons experience when introduced to MARVEL.