E-Commerce Data

Students in an entrepreneurship class have been asking for data on web or online sales for particular industry sectors. This data is often hard to find but there are some reports that collect e-commerce data that could be good starting points.

U.S. Census E-Stats Reports
Their E-Commerce Multi-Sector Report breaks out the value of e-commerce sales for industry sectors based on 3 or 4 digit NAICS codes. The data tables cover sectors in wholesale trade, retail trade, selected service industries and various types of electronic shopping and mail order houses (NAICS 4541). This is an annual report that has been published since 1999.

e-Marketer
This publisher is an aggregator of market research reports on all aspects of e-business and online marketing. You can browse all the reports on their website but you will find that although some articles are free, all the market surveys must be purchased. SIBL subscribes to the e-Marketer database.

ClickZ Stats
This website offers data and many articles of the “Top 50” type on various aspects of e-commerce including advertising, demographics, B2B, and retailing. The scope is global so you can find country focused reports here.

IAB Internet Advertising Revenue Report conducted by PricewaterhouseCoopers (PWC)
These reports of about 15 pages come out twice a year and focus on measuring advertising revenue from various internet advertising outlets. The reports do contain data on internet ad revenues for nine major industry categories. These are broadly defined industries including retail, financial services, entertainment and consumer packaged goods.

Students should also search business news databases. Tablebase uses the concept terms "e-commerce" and "electronic commerce" which can be combined with either industry or product categories. Factiva has industry codes for e-commerce, e-business (B2B), and etailing (B2C).

Resolution codes in chat reference

When you are adding a resolution code at the end of a chat session, please make sure that you are selecting the correct resolution code. One of the more confusing codes is the "Lost Call" code, which should only be used when a patron sends a question, never replies to your messages, AND did not login with an email address.

Julie Strange, the administrator of the statewide chat service in Maryland, AskUsNow!, has a nice chart detailing when to use each of the codes (PDF). (Please note that I'd recommend you never use the "Followup by Me" resolution code.)

Make sure that when you select a resolution code and click the "Add" button, you pause for about 5 seconds to ensure that the code is actually appended to the chat transcript. If you click "Add" and then rush to close the chat session, your code will not get assigned to the transcript, leaving it adrift somewhat in the system.

Global Industry Surveys on S&P NetAdvantage

We now have access to Standard & Poor's Global Industry Surveys in NetAdvantage. These reports cover three regions: Europe, Asia and Latin America. They follow the same format as the U.S. Industry Surveys and include the list of competitors in each sector, in this case sub-divided by country.

Industry coverage varies by region. Only three industry sectors: banking, wireless telecom and oil and gas, are provided for Latin America. Two industries, computer hardware and consumer electronics are unique to Asia and the aerospace and defense industry is unique to Europe. Reports are available for 23 industries in both Europe and Asia. These industries are advertising, airlines, autos and auto parts, banking, biotechnology, boradcasting and cable, chemicals, construction and engineering, electric utilities, foods and nonalcoholic beverages, healthcare-pharmaceuticals and products and supplies, industrial machinery, insurance- life & health and property/casualty, publishing, real estate, retailing-specialty, supermarkets and drugstores, telecommunications-wireless and transportation.

You will find the Global Industry Surveys under the "Industry" tab.

The Credit Crunch on Bloomberg

Bloomberg has added many new data pages to its coverage of the credit crisis. For a list of their pages on the worldwide credit crunch, type WWCC-GO. You will see data on "Bank Losses" including details on individual bank write-downs and amount of capital raised. Bloomberg is also tallying the number of jobs lost at these banks.

For an overview of the credit crunch, type CCRU-GO. This page includes the short selling restricted list at SSR-GO. Credit defaults are at CXE-GO.

Use EXPO-GO for a list of companies exposed to short term rollover and interest rate risk. The top corporate bond issuers and the top government entities are ranked based on the value of their debt maturing in the next 30 days.

Students needing definitions of the many new structured products will find them at SND-GO.

CreditWeek Now Available in S&P NetAdvantage

Standard & Poor’s has added CreditWeek to the list of publications available through its NetAdvantage portal. This weekly news magazine covering the global credit markets is available for all issues since 2006. All issues are in PDF format. The best way to access CreditWeek is to open the “Company” tab (at the top of the home page) and scroll down to the CreditWeek banner and its pull-down menu of issues.

Why would you want to use CreditWeek? CreditWeek covers credit market trends in-depth. These articles focus on specific credit instruments, the credit situation in specific countries or, a favorite of corporate librarians, an analysis of credit quality in an industry sector. Look at their analysis of the oil and gas industry in the August 27th issue. Often there are special issues like the recent ones devoted to the Housing Markets (September 24th) and Resurgent Russia (September 17th). Each issue includes the “Credit Spotlight,” short articles on recent rating actions, and the last piece in most issues is the “Featured Analysis,” an in-depth examination of the credit quality of a corporate issuer like Chrysler (September 17th) or a sovereign issuer like Brazil (October 8th).


Although each issue opens with a detailed table of contents, there is no index to the issues and the NetAdvantage “search” does not return results from CreditWeek. One work around is to use the Standard and Poor’s website which includes a browsable list of every issue from January 2006.

Corporate bond info

A research assistant stopped by the desk asking for information that may not be available. She is helping a professor see if there is a data source that tells you what percentage of a given company's corporate bonds are held by institutional investors. After consulting with Harry Gee, it seems as though that data is not likely to be disclosed by anyone, which means there is no likely data source on it.

Here's what we looked at or considered as possibilities before ruling them out:

• Standard & Poor's NetAdvantage: Offers descriptions of the corporate bonds but no details on who owns them.
• Bloomberg: Doesn't have the specific info needed although it does offer some details on the bonds themselves.
• WRDS: There is a data set in WRDS called FISD (Fixed Income Securities Database) that we don't subscribe to and that isn't likely to have the specific info needed.
• Mergent Online: Also offers specific details on different bonds issued by corporations but not who owns them or in what percentages.

I recommended that the student contact Louise Klusek to see if there might still be other sources out there we hadn't considered. If anyone has additional suggestions, please let me know by posting a comment to this blog post.

FYI: I found the Business FAQ from the Lippincott Library at U Penn to be a nice starting point in thinking about possible sources of info.

Japanese Company Profiles

A student in one section of BPL5100 alerted me that their class assignment included a comparison of their U.S. company with a competitor in a foreign market. So we should be seeing students asking for annual reports and company profiles of foreign public companies. Thomson Research is the best source for annual reports since they cover many international markets.

The standard source for profiles of Japanese companies is the Japan Company Handbook. This title is now available through LexisNexis Academic. The easiest way to search is to access the handbook through our journal finder tool. If you go to LexisNexis directly, choose the handbook from the list of sources in the General Search.

If the foreign company is a large multinational, profiles could be available in Euromonitor GMID or Business Monitor.

Library Open 24 Hours During Mid-terms

The mid-term schedule when the library will be open 24 hours for Baruch students will start at 7:00 AM on October 23rd and run through 11:59 PM on October 30th.

Global Public Finance

We have added a new module to our SDC database coverage. Global Public Financing covers U.S. municipal issues as well as public financing in Canada and internationally.

Fax Service Available for Students

The BCTC computing lab on the 6th floor now offers a fax service. Students can send faxes at no cost to local exchanges. More information on this service will be announced in a press release.

Printing in NetLibrary

Eric Neubacher just alerted me to something that seems to be a change in NetLibrary. In the past, I recall that you could print 5 pages at a time from NetLibrary titles. Now, it looks like only 1 page at a time is allowed, as is clearly spelled out in the Help pages in NetLibrary:

Print and copy selections from a full-text eContent item. You are allowed to print one page at a time using your Web browser's print function or the print function on the Adobe Acrobat toolbar. Printing the entire eContent item violates copyright laws and precautions are taken to protect those copyright laws. If a suspicious usage pattern indicates excessive printing or copying, the activity is logged and you are sent a copyright warning message.

Am I mistaken about NetLibrary's past printing policy being 5 pages? Is 5 pages the rule for one of the other ebook services (Books 24x7 or ebrary?)

Lost Flash Drive

Dear Colleagues:

This morning I found a flash drive plugged into the cpu in room 135 of the library. To "claim" it you can find it in my mail box in the second floor office suite. Thank you. David Brodherson

Can't renew books in CUNY+

In the next day or two, the ability to renew books in the My Account feature in CUNY+ should be restored. At present, renewals must be done in person or by emailing the circulation department.

Gale Directory of Publications

After meeting with most of the librarians, we are not renewing this resource as of 10/31/08, mostly because of the unsatisfactory interface. We are investigating a new product that Gale has just launched that covers directories, where we can choose which directories we want to include. Meanwhile we have the Encyclopedia of Associations in paper for 2007.

Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008

The Thomas website has details about the history of what the Senate is calling the "financial industry bailout package" in their legislative calendar. The legislation is offically called the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008. The bill numbers of the House version that was voted down is H.R. 3997 and the Senate bill that passed is H. R. 1424. The full text of the bills, House and Senate, is also available from GPO Access in PDF format.

Creating a List of Non-Profits

I had a tough e-reference question, and wanted to ask for advice. A graduate student wants to compile a list of International NGOs (non profits) in NYC. In this list, she would like to have data for: budget, staff, members of the board, mission statement, web site address, and locations of other offices in the world.

She was using Guide Star, but to get all the info she needed she needs access to the premium edition (which I presume isn't cheap). She is also using a site called Charity Navigator, and said it has a lot of the info she needs, but not budget info.

I suggested that finding a single source that has the list of everything she needs is probably unlikely, and that she would have to compile data from several sources. Which ones?

I searched through this blog and found references to previous posts about this topic which suggest looking at the IRS 990 forms, and I gave her the link to those posts. I'm guessing that even if the NGO is international, they still have to file this form if they have an office in the US.

I looked in our business directories but there was no way to filter for non-profits. I had a hard time searching the encyclopedia of associations, and even if I was searching it correctly I don't think it has the info she needs. I tried some public websites, like idealist.org, but they don't go far beyond the basics of name, address, etc.

Then I searched CUNY+ and found this at BMCC:

Encyclopedia of associations. International organizations : a guide to more than 22,000 international nonprofit membership organizations including multinational and binational groups, and national organizations based outside the United States, concerned with all subjects or areas of activity.

It's a paper copy and is from 2002, which is rather dated for something like this. But NYPL Research has an electronic version which is updated. I am going to contact the student to let her know about this, but does anyone have any additional suggestions?

Financial Comment

I doubt that the paid-subscription web site, www.whiskeyandgunpowder.com packed with financial commentary is worth a library acquisition. It might be more notable for incorporation into Ripley's Believe It Not. Either way it might make you laugh, scream or think about the huge spectrum of ideas and analysis in corporate performance.

LLMC unaccessible

Currently LLMC is not accessible and asks for a password. This is a problem to all CUNY schools that subscribe and the vendor has been notified.

Free access to all Sage journals until 10/31/08

Sage is offering free online access to their journals until October 31, 2008. You have to register individually.

SpringerLink book trial

We have a trial until the end of October of a number of e-books from SpringerLink. They have digitized a large number of their books and are doing a big push to put them out there. They are mostly in the sciences, but there are some business and social science titles. Because it is on the same platform as the e-journals I have not created a separate link for this trial.