Business & Company Resource Center Guide

Gale's Business & Company Resource Center (BCRC) is a comprehensive database containing detailed company and industry information, business case studies and articles from industry newsletters, magazines and journals.

It includes information in the following areas:

• Periodical articles, news articles, and press releases
• Detailed information for domestic and international companies and associations, including information on corporate hierarchical structures
• Company financials and earning estimates
• Investment reports
• Corporate chronologies and company histories
• Brands and product information
• Market Share data
• Industry Overviews
• HR Law Case Digests
• PDF reports on the Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats (SWOT) for select companies -- can be searched for via the Company Search page 

There are multiple ways to initiate a search on BCRC.

From the Quick Search field, you can enter search terms and then choose Company Search, Industry Description Search or Articles Search from the dropdown menu.

To enter more detailed search terms, you can use the appropriate search path from the icons displayed directly below the Quick Search field:

For example, if you click on search now under the Company Search icon, you will be given additional fields and limiters for performing your company search, helping to narrow the focus of the search:

As you see, you can narrow the search by searching for the company name and limiting by either all companies or ultimate parent (distinguishes between the parent company and similar divisions at lower levels - for example, Ford Motor Company, and Ford Credit division).  You can also search by product and brands, geographic location and industry.

Notice that there is an industry search function within the company search, as well as a separate Industry Search feature.  Industry code results from the company search shown above will consist of company profiles from that particular industry, while more expansive information - such as industry overviews, rankings and associations - are included in the Industry Search.  Both the Standard Industrial Code and North American Industry Classification System codes are supported

Various business periodicals can be accessed via BCRC.   The Articles Search feature can be used to find specific articles from magazines, journals and industry newsletters, while the Publication Search allows searching or browsing for specific titles.  Once a title is found, you can then access the particular issue and article(s) that you are searching for.

Finally, there is the Advanced Search, which basically combines all of the other variables into one search feature.  There are multiple keyword fields that can then be limited from the dropdown menu:

Accessing Search Results

Results of searches are organized by tabs.  For example, a company search for JNJ by ticker symbol will return the following result:

A company profile of Johnson & Johnson is found under the company profile tab; articles from magazines, newspapers and journals can be found under the News/Magazines tab.  Note that the other tabs are "greyed out," which indicates that they are empty.

Clicking on the blue link will open up the company profile, and reveals more enabled tabs with additional information:

You cannot see the entire company profile in the screenshot above, but it includes contact information, a brief history & description of the company, variant names, associated SIC and NAICS codes, and brief financial highlights from the past year.

Managing The Results

There are also many options once you have selected an article - or in this case, a company profile - to view.  In the upper left-hand corner, you'll find options to print (switches to a printer-friendly format), email and "mark" the document.  By clicking the mark option, you can create a list of documents or even search results to access later in a comprehensive form.  The list can then be downloaded, printed or emailed altogether.

Another feature is the InfoMark , as shown above.  Because pages within the database are dynamic, the URLs cannot be simply copied and pasted to view at a later date.  The InfoMark allows documents and search results to be given a persistent URL so that they can be accessed again.  Please note that you will have to have the subscription authorization, such as your library card number, to access the saved InfoMark.

To access B&CRC from outside of the Library

You can access the Business & Company Resource Center from the Library's hompage:

• Go to jaxpubliclibrary.org
• Choose e-research from the green box labeled resources at the bottom of the page
• Click on business for databases on that topic
• Click on Business & Company Resource Center
• If you are outside of the Library, you will have to enter your library card number (FJP000...) at this point for access

Business Index ASAP Guide

As part of InfoTrac's database lineup, Business Index ASAP provides bibliographic references, abstracts or full text of articles from more than 800 business, management, and trade publications, covering topics such as banking, investment, companies, industries and new technologies and products.

If you've ever used any of InfoTrac's databases, Business Index ASAP will look familiar to you, and it has many of the same features.

In the picture above, we see the default search screen, which is keyword search.  On the left sidebar, you'll notice that there are links to the five different types of searches that you can perform:  Subject guide, Relevance, Keyword, Advanced and Journal Search.  There is also a start over function which will clear all inputs and previous searches.

Below the search field, there are limiting options, that allow you to refine your search to full text or refereed journals only, and by date.

Let's take a look at a subject guide search:

In the sample search above, I've chosen to search for precious metals.  In a subject guide search, it is best to use only one or two words if possible.  Note:  the word and is ignored, and or and not are treated as logical operators and will result in a keyword search being performed.

If the search is successful, a subject guide will appear:

From the subject guide, we see more options.  You can view 3,057 articles about the subject precious metals, or choose see also for related subjects.  You can also refine the subject search by choosing narrow to see subdivisions within the subject heading.

Let's narrow precious metals by subdivision:

In this example, we'll choose consumption data to view the article:

In the body of the article, our subject - precious metals - is highlighted in red.  This allows you to scan through your chosen article to quickly find your search terms to see if the content is relevant to your query.  Just to the left of the article's citation is a check-box which allows the user to mark an article.  Articles and searches can be marked to create a list that can be retrieved later, and either printed or e-mailed. On the left sidebar, you'll notice several options for viewing or distributing the article:  print, e-mail or view a list of current marked items.

 Another way to find items in Business Index ASAP is to use the relevance search function.

While keyword searches look for search terms as long as they appear at least once within an article, performing a relevance search will assign articles a higher relevancy score when they contain terms more often, or when they contain terms that are found in relatively few other articles.  In short, the results should be more unique, or relevant, to the user's search query.

An important thing to remember when performing a relevance search is that boolean operators cannot be used.  Instead, punctuation and symbols are used to denote and, or and not in the search field.  For example, if you want to search for a phrase you would use quotation marks:  "miami dolphins."  To find articles that must include a given word, use the plus (+) sign:  +commodities would include the term commodities in the search.  Alternatively, use the minus (-) sign to signal the search engine to find article that do not contain a given term:  -management would find articles that do not contain the term management.

To search for a specific journal, use the journal search.  Unlike JAXCAT (the Library's catalog), you may leave in stop words such as a and the, since InfoTrac can still perform the search while ignoring those terms.  Let's find Harvard Business Review, shall we?

First, type the title into the journal search field and click "search."  From the results list, click on the title link.  This will take you to a page with individual issues from the available years archived in the database:

Choose the appropriate year, then select a particular issue.  Then you will see a list of all available articles for that issue:

Feel free to give Business Index ASAP a spin when you get some free time.  It can be particularly helpful when looking for articles dealing with banking, investment and management issues.