another possible source re Yankees and marketing and new stadium

Today in Washington D.C. the House Subcommittee on Domestic Policy is holding a hearing:
Gaming the Tax Code: Public Subsidies, Private Profits and Big League Sports in New York City.

Some news stories have begun to appear about the testimonies that are being given.

I looked at one of the prepared statements and there was some interesting information about ticket prices for the new stadium. (It is provided in the framework of if the public is subsidizing the construction then should prices be lower.) Some of the information being provided by those testifying is from previously private information.

I thought it might be of some interest to those students who have the marketing assignment related to the Yankees. It might serve as an example that information can be found in different types of documents and statements.

Kraft Foods will join Dow Jones Industrial Average next Monday

Kraft Foods will join the stocks in the Dow Jones Industrial Average with the beginning of trading next Monday, according to an announcement made this morning. It will replace AIG.

Yankees and "Sports and Tourism"

Going on the hypothesis that a lot of resources exist about "cultural tourism" therefore a similar word strategy should work for the Yankees I ran a quick search experiment to see if a parallel might work to find information about the Yankees or more broadly other baseball teams or yet wider sports. Sure enough "sports and tourism" in a marketing database such as Business Source Premier led to a number of articles about sports attendance with at least marketing studies mentioned in the article abstract.

This is merely a starting point but possibly a helpful one. The search can be refined with "baseball" or "stadium" or other words or market or business oriented databases.

Re: student assignment re hospital closings and the impact on the quality of patient care

Yesterday I helped a new MBA student who is in the joint program about health care administration. They have an assignment in which she was to find information to support the position that the closure of hospitals does not impact the quality of patient care. (She said she didn't believe this, but it was the position she was assigned.) I showed her how to use Bearcat, which resulted in some articles (I limited the search to health resources and the year 2007 for the example.) She said it didn't matter what type of hospital (other than being in the U.S.) Using NBER, Health Reference, Medline, and ABI inform, we found some articles and studies. Health Reference has the subject heading hospital closures. A number of the articles dealt with the closure of specific types of hospitals--for example public hospitals for the mentally ill. SSRN had some articles about closures of hospitals in other countries.
The student is currently employed as a physician's assistant at a NYC hospital.

Marketing 3520 assignment re NY Yankees

Several students have come to the reference desk seeking demographics of those who attend NY Yankees baseball games. This is rather difficult information to find since the Yankees are privately held. (Perhaps students could try calling the Yankees' information office to see if this information is available. Asking people who attend the last games this weekend at the stadium may not be typical as it is the final series in the stadium.) I could not locate any statistical information about attendees on the Major League baseball website but once again, perhaps a phone call might be helpful.

Although the statistics are from 1998, the NYC Independent Budget Office produced some reports about attendees of games when NYC aid for construction of the new stadium was being considered. This report and others about the Yankees can be found at the IBO's web site and then search "Yankees."

HispanicBusiness had an article in July 2008 regarding the importance of Hispanic fans to baseball, which includes some information about the NY Yankees.

Hearing from Yankees fans, might also be possible through blogs. The economics of Yankees tickets, has some interesting comments, including that regular Joes have been priced out of the stadium, including many residents of the Bronx. Other comments include that regular families can only afford to attend one game a year.

I found some articles searching Factiva about how the Yankees led in attendance.

If anyone has any other ideas, please contribute.

Follow-up on Private Equity

Students (or librarians) wanting to know more about the key sources for research in private equity and venture capital should consult the guide to the Venture Capital and Private Equity Industry from the Baker Library at Harvard Business School.

Directories of private equity firms

I thought I'd share two sources for a question I hadn't gotten before. A patron asked for a directory of private equity firms and angel investors. With Louise's help, we identified two print sources that would work for this:

• Galante's Venture Capital and Private Equity Directory (not at Baruch, but at SIBL)
• Pratt's Guide to Venture Capital Sources (Baruch has 2007, SIBL has 2008)

I tried D&B $Million Database, but found that the relevant SIC and NAICS codes weren't finely grained enough to search for just private equity companies.

Laptops for Faculty

I've updated the wiki page on laptops to reflect the fact that faculty can now borrow laptops from us. Details of the policy can also be found on that page.

Using the Reuters Terminal at Reference

This is a reminder that any use of the Reuters terminal at the reference desk is subject to the same rules that apply in the Subotnick Center. Most importantly, students may not save data to a USB device or print from the terminal. Data should be saved to the desktop and e-mailed to their address.

These rules are clearly stated on the two notice boards posted next to our terminal. The current group of students with the class assignment is one of the BUS1000 classes that uses the Subotnick Center as their classroom and they should be aware of the rules.

The Information Commons at the U of Kentucky

The undergraduate library at the University of Kentucky has posted a promotional video about their information commons. I heard Stacey Greenwell speak about designing what they call The Hub at SLA.

The video uses students to tell the story. Some things you might note are the reference desk signs that say "Help Help Help," the reference station on wheels, and the movable white boards.

The United Airlines Story and Information Literacy

Amy Fry posted a great piece on the ACRLog this morning about the implications of the UAL incident for information literacy(See my post from yesterday for details). She calls it "Information is Power - Even When It's Wrong."

She makes four points:

Proper metadata is important

There is no substitute for critical thinking about sources

Sometimes aggregators are misleading

Google is more powerful than even we realized.

Westlaw Campus Research back on

It's working again.

Various Gale databases not working

Currently Gale Virtual Reference, Literature Resource Center, and MLA are giving error messages. This is a problem on Gale's end that their engineers are trying to fix.

Check Your Sources

An article in yesterday’s New York Times, “A Mistaken News Report Hurts United,” makes the case for always checking your sources and would be a perfect story to use when teaching business students. The stock of United Airlines fell from $12 to $3 dollars in less than an hour and trading in the stock had to be halted. How did it happen? An analyst in a research firm found an article about United saying they would file for bankruptcy and put it in his investment advisory where it was linked to by Bloomberg News. He found the article in a search on Google for bankruptcy filings in 2008. What he did not note was that the article was six years old. A follow-up story in today’s Wall Street Journal, “UAL Story Blame is Placed on Computer,” puts the blame on search robots. First the Sun-Sentinel featured the story as one of its most popular for the day and then Google’s bot picked it up and featured it on Google News, and finally, automated trading programs picked up the headline and started selling.

AP Images

Our subscription to AP Images has been canceled and I am removing it from the list of databases.

Gale Virtual Reference unavailable

Gale is looking into the problem.

Problems with CUNY Plus

This is the latest update from systems:

CUNY+ has come back, but browse is not working properly in the local catalogs - it is investigated and you'll be updated when it's restored.

Browse works OK in the Union Catalog (all CUNY libraries), and keyword works OK in the local catalogs.

CUNY Network Problems

CUNY CIS sent this notice out at 8:25 AM this morning:

CUNY CIS is currently experiencing some networking problems. Some application such us the CUNY Portal Login, Sharepoint, Stellent, Track-It, etc. may be inaccessible. Our administrators are working diligently to resolve the problem.

Westlaw Campus Research

We cannot connect at the moment. West is investigating.

Now that's advertising!

The statewide chat reference service QandANJ aired a 30-second spot in NJ markets last night during the MTV Video Music Awards. Here's the ad:

(link to video)

This is actually the 2nd year that QandANJ has done this. Here's last year's ad:

(link to previous year's video)

FYI: QandANJ is part of the QuestionPoint chat reference cooperative.