On How to Handle Not Knowing Everything

“You’re not always going to have all the answers, and that’s okay! In fact, those situations are beautiful opportunities to learn and have fun. Conduct solo research and don’t be afraid to reach out to colleagues (even sending a cold email to someone you haven’t met before). Library professionals are generous with sharing their knowledge. You’ll likely get some great advice for moving forward with the task at hand and make a new professional connection.”

“Don’t try to be the absolute subject expert on business topics. It’s not necessary that you know the ins-and-outs of agricultural commodity futures, for example, only that you know generally what that information is, and how to find it for patron’s use. We’re information and searching experts, not expert researchers in the field itself, and trying to become an expert on every business question (especially if that’s not your background!) can be exhausting.” - Shaun Bennett, North Carolina State University

“Don’t be afraid to admit when you don’t know something, and to ask clarifying questions! Business, like all disciplines, has unique terminology. Things get even trickier when you factor in the different names and codes vendors use for the same thing - one industry could have 3 different codes in 3 different sources. Engaging in a conversation ensures you and the patron can share an understanding of what they actually need.”

“Do not be afraid to ask for clarification, especially when students use jargon or terms that you are not familiar with. This is especially true when people use terms with multiple meanings. I once found a great deal on how veterans selected what drugs to use, when I discovered that the “vet” was actually veterinarians....” - Corey Seeman, Ross School of Business (University of Michigan)

If you were formally taught to conduct a ‘reference interview’ these tips will sound familiar to you, but it can be so easy to skip some steps in practice. Searching online to get some background context will be very helpful so that you can ask meaningful clarification questions. Wikipedia, Investopedia, and published encyclopedias are all very helpful to get a quick and basic understanding of a topic. My colleague Todd Hines and I provided examples of things to clarify with researchers in our (2020) article “Eight things to know about business research data.” For more tips on data reference, consult the Data Quality Evaluation project (https://sites.google.com/view/imls2022-data-quality/), an IMLS funded project led by business librarians Grace Liu, Rashelle Nagar, Bobray Bordelon, and Marydee Ojala that offers workshops and a forthcoming free e-book.

My personal tip is to sign up for current awareness newsletters in areas of interest to you and your patrons. I like to subscribe to many newsletters when I come across them and then unsubscribe to those that aren’t meeting my needs or interests, which change over time. Some of my favorites are: Morning Brew (referral link https://www.morningbrew.com/daily/r?kid=2e1fc403) for a quick daily update on general business news; Data is Plural (https://www.data-is-plural.com) for awareness of free datasets that could be of interest to social science researchers; NBER Digest (https://www.nber.org/digest) for new economics working papers to see what novel sources researchers are using; and Benedict’s Newsletter (https://www.ben-evans.com/newsletter), which focuses on the tech industry and is particularly relevant where I work in Silicon Valley.

You can see additional business reference recommendations on the Getting Started with Business Reference (https://brass.libguides.com/BusinessReference) guide put together by members of BRASS (the Business Reference and Services Section of ALA).

On Finding Where Information May Be

“Have a copy of [the] Business Information Resources (2023) book on hand. Also, this is a great book: Strauss’s Handbook of Business Information (2020).”

“With sources, think broadly. A random example: ebay, for instance, can contain much owner-researched information succinctly presented.”

“Ask the requestor to think about “who cares” to collect the needed information. As that’s a guide to where to begin looking.”

Another core resource that is often recommended is Making Sense of Business Reference (2019) by Celia Ross, who also teaches a virtual “Business Reference 101” class through ALA’s Reference & User Services Association (RUSA). Many new business librarians (myself included!) have taken this course and/or read the book, which provide an incredibly useful framework to help you learn how to answer business reference questions.

Another tip that comes up is to search the open web for guides that other librarians and researchers have put together on the topic (e.g., sustainability resources or getting started guides for MBA students). A common search string folks use is the keyword/phrase + site:.edu + Guide OR libguide OR library guide OR faq OR libanswers.

In the past, I’ve also found some blogs published by researchers or business information professionals about using specific tools (e.g., see ResearchFinancial blog posts about SDC Platinum (https://researchfinancial.wordpress.com/category/sdc-platinum)) that really helped me understand how to use certain resources and things to watch for (such as how when working with things like CUSIPs as company identifiers, make sure that your spreadsheet software isn’t dropping leading zeros!). To find where certain data exists (particularly financial data), the Harvard Business School Baker Library’s Fast Answers (https://asklib.library.hbs.edu), the Lippincott Library of the Wharton Schools’ FAQs (https://faq.library.upenn.edu/business), and the Stanford Graduate School of Business Library’s Knowledge Base (https://gsb-research-help.stanford.edu/library) can be helpful. For more student-focused information, I particularly like using the San Diego State University’s Business Guide (https://libguides.sdsu.edu/business) and UC Irvine’s Business Research Guide (https://guides.lib.uci.edu/business).

On Budget Friendly Finds

“Due to limited funding at my institution, I am always on the lookout for freely-available or open-access resources. Yahoo! Finance (https://finance.yahoo.com) is one such resource that has proved helpful in answering business reference questions. My favorite feature of this resource is its trove of historical stock prices. Users can click “Historical Data” on the page for any individual stock, choose a time frame, and retrieve stock prices from those dates. It is fun to see stock prices from notable dates in history.” - Maria Souliotis, Northeastern State University

“10-K reports [the 10-K is the annual report that [public] companies have to file with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and are freely available via EDGAR (https://www.sec.gov/edgar/searchedgar/companysearch)- section 1A Risk Factors - lists the risks a public company is facing or will face in the future, the risks are listed in order of importance - this is an important resource I suggest students use when they are writing a SWOT analysis, and looking for weaknesses in an industry. Selecting a few companies in the industry [that] the SWOT is being written for, helps the student see the Weaknesses (Risks) and possible ways of dealing with them (Opportunities).

“EconBiz (https://www.econbiz.de): Searching, Accessing, Saving [EconBiz is a free search interface to find business and economics journal articles, working papers, and conference proceedings] plus Research Skills Tutorials (https://www.econbiz.de/eb/en/research-skills/test-your-research-skills).”) - Tamara Pianos, ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics

You might find yourself at an institution with a smaller budget, necessitating the need to look for more budget-friendly sources. However, even if you are at an institution with many resources, if you work with public patrons and/or alumni, you may find that those patrons are unable to use many of those resources. One commonly suggested recommendation for those needing budget-friendly options is to get familiar with free government information and data, like the tip above about using a company’s 10-K annual report. The U.S. government, in particular, has a lot of data available for free online. The official portal to the data is data.gov (https://data.gov), but many departments will have their own portals with additional features, like data.census.gov (https://data.census.gov) . While it isn’t a government site, Data USA (https://datausa.io) is a very user-friendly site that points to a lot of free government sources. Another one of my favorite free government resources is the set of CRS Reports created by information professionals in the Library of Congress for members of Congress on a wide variety of topics. And of course, our public library colleagues are invaluable resources as well. Of note, your mileage will vary if you’re looking for non-US information, as countries will vary on how much information they collect and how much they make available online and in English.

Another suggestion that comes up is to learn how to get the most value out of business database aggregators (like EBSCO’s Business Source or ProQuest’s ABI/INFORM and Business One databases). For example, you can typically create direct links to specific content in these databases (such as MarketLine Reports) and provide those links on research guides so that users can just add their keywords to the search to get what they need. Stephen Fadel wrote in his Fall 2022 Academic BRASS newsletter article titled “Developing direct links” about making direct links to things like MarketLine company reports in an aggregator. I do this to create “combined search” links so people can search both the online articles and the print articles for specific publications, like the Harvard Business Review (https://gsb-research-help.stanford.edu/library/faq/283594).

Finally, while we all wish it was easier to benchmark our collections with peer institutions, making connections with other business librarians who work at similar schools is a great way to both expand your network and potentially compare notes about each other’s collections that will be more relevant to your respective situations.

On Newspapers

“We purchased a college wide subscription to WSJ.com, which has real life applications in real time. Each member of the community creates his/her account, and it can be used in the curriculum.” - Scott Tarbox, Santa Fe College

In the past five or so years, the number of campus-wide newspaper site subscriptions that are available and licensed has grown significantly. Previously, libraries could only provide online access to newspapers in aggregators like ProQuest or Factiva. While these resources can be great at indexing news articles, they lack many features that patrons have come to expect for online news content, such as same-day access; ability to see multimedia content like images, tables, graphs, videos, and interactive data visualizations; easy-to-use mobile access; and more. The Wall Street Journal’s WSJ.com paved the way for other vendors to offer these types of subscriptions that typically (but not always) require users to create an individual account using a university email. In order to ensure those users are still authorized, a yearly, built-in account renewal process is now common practice. Other sites relevant to business libraries that now offer similar subscription methods include New York Times, Washington Post, Financial Times, Bloomberg.com, PoliticoPro, and more.

Understandably, many librarians are concerned about this trend given how expensive these subscriptions are. For those who have been able to license them, it can feel like “double paying” for the content in aggregators and then directly from the publishers. It seems that at some point it will become an unsustainable model and something will have to change. While I’ve heard this conversation happening informally, I haven’t seen much being said in the literature or at conferences, which I hope changes soon.

Many librarians also report a growing number of patrons requesting access to more niche news sites that are digital media platforms often becoming popular through their email newsletter subscriptions (e.g., The Information). Some of these will have an option to provide campus-wide subscriptions, but many have not worked with many (or any) in the academic market. I’ve come across many of these sites who want to charge a slightly discounted annual fee (often still hundreds of dollars) for every single eligible user on campus (!), or will only provide a set number of accounts that you have to figure out how to distribute and then turn over as folks leave. More often than not, they do not have access and cost models that will work at the majority of institutions at this time.