Week 6, Business Tools

I'm a big fan of MARVEL's academic tools, but I haven't had terribly much experience with the business end of their tools. I'm quite familiar with the Academic Search Premier, as it used to be called, and the clear similarities with the Business Source Complete are quite nice. The interface is straightforward and uncomplicated, encouraging users to jump right in.
     The first set of results show that the pool of sources include business journals and serials as well as industry focused technical articles. Excellent materials for business research, and just what I would hope to see!  The visual search left me uncertain here. The interface is slick and responsive, but the suggested sample search of "FM Radio" came back with so many technical articles that I'd likely need more information than either visual search format would provide. I suspect that for technical details I would want to skim some of the abstracts in ways the visual style doesn't permit at a glance. Less technical articles where I may be able to judge the content off a title more accurately would certainly be useful.

Econlit
     Econlit seemed like a very simple, utilitarian search at first. The search instructions gave me little hope for a big discovery here, yet I did have one very pleasant surprise. Within my first three searches, I had a search that 'failed'. This didn't give me a blank results screen, or even an error screen. Instead, I found that in a very google-like move that the database had corrected my search terms and informed me of it with a bold message up top stating: Note: "Your initial search query did not yield any results. However, using SmartText Searching, results were found based on your keywords"
     This is a wonderful step forward for databases, particularly those with controlled vocabulary. This enables users unfamiliar with the intricacies of controlled vocabulary systems to make use of them without devoting a great deal of time and care into learning the systems. Not only does this help direct users to the information that they're seeking, but it gives them enough feedback to begin teaching a more complicated search system to them. Sure, one encounter with this form of user correction is unlikely to make a huge difference, but repeated use of it will help the user form more appropriate search strategies each time. 

Regional Business News does a good job from the macro to the micro. I began with world-spanning business news by looking up a few articles on BP, and worked my way back to something a little more local and closer to our hearts with one of my favorite Maine companies, LibraryThing!  I don't have a lot to expand on, as the RBN delivered results quickly, clearly, and in full-text, which is all I tend to hope for from most Databases. :)

Value Line
      Value Line certainly starts out as the black sheep of the databases for me. Not for it's content, but for poor design and execution. The first and most notable impact of Value Line is how it immediately locked my browser up for over 30 seconds. I would have quit out of the browser in normal circumstances, it was only my panic at potentially losing this current post that stayed my hand.   Next came a moment of confusion as I tried to  click on the link for the "Investment Survey" and got no results. The icon of a lock beside it made me wonder at first if I was missing some way of access, as it wasn't even making a request for the passport. Instead the answer was simpler, I was already -on- that page, and there was no good titling or other indications of the fact.
    I began to check out more specified reports, but at nearly every click came another lengthy browser freeze. It became such a problem I would have suggested the print source of valueline over the internet database if I were assisting a patron, so I abandoned further searches. I know from familiarity with Valueline that it is full to bursting with useful figures and information, but a laggy day at best to terrible coding at worse make me hesitant to add this to a list of first-response online sources. If I had another alternative, I would use it over Valueline's frustratingly slow performance.

Wall Street Journal Online
     It's lovely to have a source to get past the WSJ's paywall, of course, but other than that I'd rarely made use of this database before. What immediately struck me were the search refinements available. While selections such as publication title and date are frequent limiters, WSJ goes beyond, offering options for location, language, person, subject and even tags to be selected. The date-limiting comes with a lovely visual bar-graph to show how much content is available from a given time period, making it easy to know how strictly you're limiting a search by timeline, and showing as well a visual timeline of when a given topic/search term was producing a lot of results in the media. It's an intuitive set of options any researcher will instantly grasp the potential of. I hope that more of our databases follow that trend and provide such user-friendly tools.