Business by the Books

Donna Bacon, the library district’s reference manager, offered a sneak peek of the library’s redesigned business reference Web site to the Springfield Area Chamber of Commerce’s Small Business Council during an Aug. 1 meeting.

The site, www.thelibrary.org/mindbus/databases.cfm, will feature numerous reference databases for individuals and businesses of all sizes and industries when it is complete later this month. Library officials also plan to post business podcasts and monitor an online forum about business issues.

Among the information that will be available through the new site: Reference USA Business, a database of more than 14 million businesses across the country that’s updated daily and searchable by a wide variety of criteria.

“A lot of companies use Reference USA to do mailing lists,” Bacon said. “They download the information and print out mailing labels. You can search by radius – put in an address and say you want every business within a certain distance in a certain industry.”

Another useful database is Business Decision, which allows users to identify household information for a specified area anywhere in the country. Bacon said the advantage of the service is the ability to customize results.

“It has extensive consumer market segmentation and demographic data,” she said, noting that selected areas can be anything from a specific ZIP code to homes within a certain distance of a specific location. “It gives you all this data, beyond population, household income and (other) typical census information.”

Dwayne Fulk, attorney with Neale & Newman LLP and a past president of the Small Business Council, said after the presentation that he was impressed with the services the library has to offer for businesses of all sizes.

“Marketing and intelligence gathering are of extreme concern to businesses, but they often don’t know where to start,” Fulk said. “What the library can provide is a great place to start, and for many, a place to finish that research.”

The library also hopes to get some assistance from the business community with a couple of new offerings: an online forum where visitors can get answers to common business questions and podcasts from local professionals about their areas of expertise.

Bacon said the wide variety of informational services is designed to serve three main groups of customers who need business information.

“There are those who come into the library wanting to know how to start a small business,” Bacon said. “You have to understand the community, understand what opportunities are out there, and a lot of that is referral to get them to the experts that they need. The (second) group is investors – people who need investment or retirement information – and the third group is people coming in to do research for projects or just wanting information about a particular company.”

Most of the information sources are not new offerings, but business librarian Mike DePue said the new site is an attempt to make library services known to a wider audience.

“Unless people have used these (services) and experienced them, they may not expect us to have them,” he said.

“It’s also about the advancing ability to provide services such as these as technology advances, and increasing people’s awareness that we’re doing this.”

Making patrons aware of new offerings isn’t easy, DePue added.

He said he still sees customers come to the Library Center looking for the physical card catalog – which the library stopped using in 1982.

“If we can’t even get those things across, the other resources probably also need better promotion,” he said with a laugh.

Springfield-Greene County Library has many business research resources available for patrons. Among them:

• Business Decision, a mapping service with household demographic information

• EBSCO Regional Business News

• Morningstar’s database of information on stocks and mutual funds

• Reference USA Business, a national collection of business data

• Wall Street Journal archives dating back to 1889

Podcasts and online forums also will be available through the library’s new Web site, www.the

library.org/mindbus/databases.cfm.