Abstract
This paper addresses the question of the need for American business information in the UK in the light of the development of the European Single Market. In order to establish what needs exist and what sources are used, a questionnaire was sent to 80 business libraries throughout the UK, and in-depth interviews were carried out. The surveys show that, although the need for US data is small in some areas, it is still an important part of business information provision and is likely to remain so.
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References
1.
Dun's Market Identifiers is widely used, especially for finding information on difficult companies. It contains profiles of over seven million US business locations, and information on corporate links. The records include sales, growth, number of employees, executive names and SIC codes. All records have been updated within twelve months
2.
There is also a Dun & Bradstreet database which contains some private company information, Dun's Financial Records Plus, which gives full financial statements on approximately 680,000 US companies
3.
Trinet Company Database has information on all single- and multi-establishment companies with 20 or more employees and also includes private companies
4.
The Disclosure Database is a valuable source of company information, as it holds financial information for over 12,000 public companies
5.
PTS PROMT (Predicasts Overview of Markets and Technology) is a good source of business and industry information, as it contains abstracts and full-text articles for worldwide information on companies, products, technologies and markets
6.
There are also a number of newswire, newspaper and newsletter databases, which can be helpful when looking for information on regional American companies, especially small ones. One such service is Dow Jones News/Retrieval, which exclusively holds the full text of The Wall Street Journal , and the Dow Jones New Service, which has continually updated news covering companies and industries
7.
Another such database is Business Dateline, which contains company and industry news from over 130 regional business publications and often covers smaller companies
8.
Investext holds full-text company and industry research reports, and also holds opinions of Wall Street investment analysts
9.
Many directories, including the Million Dollar Directory, Standard & Poor's and the Thomas Register , are also available online
10.
There are countless other databases which cover American business information, but they are too extensive to cover here. (Readers are referred to Headland Press's Online/CD-ROM Business Sourcebook ). Dialog is probably the best host for databases containing this information, as the majority of databases discussed here are available on it. Dow Jones and Mead Data Central's Lexis/Nexis are also good host services for this information, and Data-Star is also beginning to carry a few more American databases, which is useful for users who also need extensive European information