MIND YOUR OWN BUSINESS

摘要

Like any well-run company deciding on what products and services to offer, a good library should pay attention to customer demand when it is building its business reference collection. What kind of information do business patrons want? Most are looking for company and industry details: a corporate, address or name of an officer, financial data for a stock or mutual fund investment, a list of competitors or the key companies in a particular industry, or news articles on the trends in an industry or who has the biggest market share. Because of the nature of these "tell me everything about this company or industry" questions, business reference does not follow traditional research patterns. We don't start with a typical dictionary or encyclopedia entry and then move to books and periodical and newspaper articles. The primary research tools are company directories, investment/financial reports and loose-leaf services, industry surveys, and business periodical index/abstract/full-text databases, published by such major business reference publishers as Thomson Gale, Standard & Poor's, Dun & Bradstreet, Hoover's, and Mergent.