explodedlibrary.info

3 free business research resources I can’t do without

Yes, I work in a law library, but a lot of my research work is business research. Each of these items has been helpful for me on several occasions.

1. Thomson Reuters league tables

For some reason I can never find the free version easily on search engines. I wonder if they’re using robots.txt to turn them away… – so I’m linking to them here. In case the URL changes, here’s how you navigate to them from Thomson Reuters home page:

Business Units / Financial / then in the Resources section on the lower right hand side of the page.

Although there are commercial services which also monitor deals, most of the people I work with only care about these free ones. I wonder if it’s because they are free and accessible, that they have become the defacto benchmark.

2. Yahoo Finance for historical Australian share prices

For people who can’t afford a Bloomberg terminal or products like FinAnalysis, Yahoo Finance (or Yahoo7 Finance as it’s branded in Australia) is the next best thing. Even the Australian Stock Exchange, which only provides extremely limited historical share prices on its official website, unofficially recommends Yahoo Finance for historical research. The site isn’t perfect – its share prices certainly don't go back to the 1980s, but for a lot of the requests I get, its range is sufficient and it is very easy to use.

The biggest difficulty with using Yahoo Finance is to get my internal clients to accept it as a legitimate information source. If there’s no “official” source for this data, they’re all unofficial. Then it all comes down to how the brands of the different sources are perceived. Let me just say that Yahoo is not a brand that is highly regarded by Australian lawyers. But if they cross checked the Yahoo data with prices from back issues of the Australian Financial Review newspaper, and saw no difference, would that change their perception?

3. Karen Blakeman’s list of Official Company Registers

Researching privately held international companies is one of the more difficult things to do in business research, especially when you’re not at all familiar with how a country regulates companies. Karen Blakeman’s list provides a very useful starting point.

Because in the USA, private companies are registered by state governments, Karen also has links to the relevant state government agencies.

Do you know of any other good free business research resources? Hoarding information is unlibrarianly (if that's a word) and ultimately self-defeating, so please leave a comment with your business research tip or secret.

researching EMs

The EM (Explanatory Memorandum) is an extremely useful document in Australian legal research. Many people just assume that every parliament in the Australian federal system has always produced an EM for every Bill. Unfortunately this is not true.

Last week I was asked to find an EM for a 1980 South Australian Act. But they don’t exist, instead the end portion of the their Second Reading Speeches is a lot like an EM, with a clause by clause discussion of the Bill.

How did I know this information? From an extremely helpful publication from the Commonwealth Parliamentary library, ‘Was there an EM?’: Explanatory Memoranda and Explanatory Statements in the Commonwealth Parliament

I suggest that anyone who ever may need to find an EM should read the whole thing, there is very interesting and useful information about the history and purpose of the EM. There’s also information about the EM’s cousins, the Explanatory Statement (used for Commonwealth regulations) and the Comparative Memorandum.

But if you’re only interested in knowing if a particular state or territory produced EMs during a given year, go straight to Appendix 2, towards the end of the document. One of the best things about legal research is knowing for certain that something definitely does not exist – because then you don’t need to waste time trying to find it.

the four elements of the Law Library Request from Hell

Urgent / Rude / Arbitrary or Unnecessary / Banal

Urgent

Even the most easy and simple task can be stressful if it needs to be repeated 100 times in 5 minutes. When the task is more complicated and it needs to be done in an unrealistic time frame, bad things can happen. I can see three usual outcomes to the unrealistic deadline.

• The best outcome is when librarian receives some help – from other librarians or from paralegals or even from the lawyer, and is able to get the job done in the required time.
• If there is no help forthcoming, the only way to meet an impossible deadline is to cut corners – do research which looks complete, but isn’t. That would be the worst outcome, and shouldn’t even be contemplated.
• The only other alternative is that the deadline is not met – and the work is finished when it is finished.

Whatever happens, a stressful time is guaranteed for all.

Sometimes tight and urgent deadlines cannot be avoided. I know this. But sometimes they can. I heard of one incident when a paralegal had been charged with collecting a few dozen cases which needed to go to Court the next morning. He was given this task at 10 am and did not approach the library about this until 4 pm!

That incident made me wonder how often these urgent requests are only urgent because someone upriver stuffed things up. All I’m saying is that it’s never too early to come to the library for help with a big research job.

Rude

Rudeness is the easiest element to avoid and probably the most virulent when it’s triggered. Rudeness often accompanies urgency and arbitrariness.

By rudeness I mean deliberate rudeness, not unrefined manners. Things like snapping or shouting, or making demeaning remarks.

Rudeness causes problems in the short term and the long term.

In the short term, unless the librarian has the emotional resilience of a robot, rudeness can ratchet up the difficulty levels of all aspects of the request. An easy request within a tight deadline may be transformed into a difficult request with an impossible deadline.

The good thing about where I work is that this sort of rudeness is extremely rare. Because it doesn’t happen a lot, when it does happen, it really sticks out. Word of it gets around, and in the long run, it’s never a desirable reputation to have.

Arbitrary or Unnecessary

Arbitrariness is when work is done for no reason. The most common instance is when a librarian busts her or his gut completing a difficult research task within a urgent deadline, only to learn later that none of it was actually needed.

Another manifestation of arbitrariness is when a judge or barrister insists that cases must be photocopied and not downloaded from a database as a pdf - which looks identical to the printed version. This really happens.

Unnecessary work is slightly different, it’s when the librarian has do a lot of work that’s unnecessary, usually because of the requestor’s carelessness or indifference. One example would be a wild goose chase caused by sloppily cited cases.

Banal

Banality needs some explanation about why it’s one of the elements. It is to emphasize that the Request from Hell is not just any difficult request. I don’t mind requests which are difficult and really test my research skills. Even if a request is urgent and arbitrary, and even if the requester is rude, if it’s a challenging question, I’m likely to learn something from the experience.

For me, a nasty request can’t be a true Request from Hell unless it’s also banal (“Common in a boring way, to the point of being predictable; containing nothing new or fresh.” From the Wiktionary).

My definition of the Request from Hell is meant to be extreme, the absolute worst of the worst. All four of the elements must be satisfied. That hasn't happened to me in my current job.

Of course, such a scale is very subjective. I imagine there could be librarians who are accustomed to dealing with what I consider the Request from Hell fairly regularly. There may be others who might read some of the things I have described and think I’ve already experienced several Requests from Hell. That is one of the interesting things about law firm libraries, there is such diversity in how they operate. I would love to hear other librarian’s opinions and experiences about this.

Please don’t name names of law firms or other employers in your comments.

The Australian Financial Review decides that it no longer needs librarians

Just in:
Margaret Simons, "Fairfax's business arm shooshes the librarians", Crikey, 9 July 2008

Australian Financial Review and Fairfax Business Media have opted out of a new budgeting system under which they were called on to pay their share of the cost of groupwide services, including IT, accounts and library services. Fairfax Business Media have decided they don't need to pay for the library. [my emphasis]

...

Now, according to Brown's [Deborah Brown, Information Services Manager at Fairfax Media] e-mail, AFR bosses Michael Gill and Glenn Burge have decided that journalists can be "self-service researchers". Yet she says that previously, Business Media reporters have accounted for twenty per cent of the work of the library.

Anybody who cares about the quality of business journalism in Australia, or the role of libraries in media organizations will read this and weep.

my rant on the afr.com fiasco

[6 October 2007 update: This post has been followed up here]

The Australian Financial Review, nicknamed the Fin and sometimes AFR, is perhaps the newspaper of record for the Australian business sector. It used to have arrangements with aggregators such as Factiva, Media Monitors and NewsBank. At some point, it decided that it wasn't making enough money from licensing its content online in this way. In addition, the head of Fair Business Media, Michael Gill, was convinced that AFR content needed to be locked down, "because because one bank used an AFR article to support a prospectus." So AFR decided to develop its own platform for online access to its content and abruptly ended licenses with Factiva and the others.

There's was more information about the afr.com debacle in the second article by Stephen Mayne in Crikey called "Remember the glory days of AFR.com", but sadly that's in the pay section of Crikey and I can't link to that. So I thought I'd add my impressions of afr.com and thoughts about the whole process. I am the first to admit that what follows is not a thoughtful objective review, but a rant. The afr.com fiasco has been a major inconvenience to me and many of my co-workers and faculty and students at MPOW.

I tried out the new afr.com both in beta and since its release on a trial subscription. My first impressions of the beta product was that it was an absolute dog. The current release is better than what I saw in beta, but I still think the product is a dog.

The product has a flash-driven interface. This has a number of effects. It makes afr.com a real memory hog. For example, when I'm running Firefox for Windows I don't use it lightly. I have multiple tabs open, I have various web apps running and maybe the Firefox application is using 90 MB of RAM. When I'm running afr.com in Firefox, that number jumps to 250 MB. The other thing is that the application is very slow. Don't bother trying to do anything quickly in afr.com, especially typing or scrolling or clicking on buttons. The other "feature" of the flash-driven interface is that it's impossible to copy and paste text from afr.com. This is a part of their strategy to eliminate copyright infringement by treating paying customers as if they were thieves.

Even if one pays for a monthly subscription (the cheapest being $A 25/month), it is not an all you can eat package. Usage is metered with credits. It costs one credit to open an article. What struck me as tremendously stingy - or clueless - is that if you do a regular search on afr.com, you do not see any page numbers in the list of results. That exclusive information only appears once you choose to spend a credit to open the article. Don't they realize that page numbers are needed in most citation systems?

I was expecting that afr.com would, if nothing else, be a good way of reading the Fin online, similar to wsj.com, the digital edition of the Wall Street Journal. But there seems no good way of browsing the current issue of the Fin in afr.com. The home page on afr.com seems to contain some articles from today’s paper, but it also contains links to other non-premium publications like Reuters or the Sydney Morning Herald – both of which can be viewed for free elsewhere. I've since learned that afr.com is different from the Digital Edition of the Australian Financial Review. The digital edition is only included with afr.com when people subscribe to the spendy ($A 150.00/month) advanced markets package. Compare that with wsj.com, that's available for $US 9.95/month [yesterday, that amounted to approximately $A 11.92].

I have one positive thing to say about afr.com. At least they bothered making it compatible with Macs. The product does work with Firefox and Safari, except that mouse wheel scrolling doesn't work in either Mac browser.  For some reason, they use the most unreadable font for full-text articles in the Safari browser.

And what's with the advertising? I don't mind ads on products I use for free, e.g. Google or smh.com.au. But afr.com is priced as a premium product. I think that somebody paying for a clunky product should be spared from ads.

I doubt that this going to be a huge problem for me, seeing that I don't intend to use the product again, but the online help in afr.com is very poor. They are large glossy-looking slow-loading pdf files which look and read more like marketing pieces than online help. It's a microcosm of the problems with all of afr.com, they go for bling and end up with something slow and unusable.

Afr.com’s major flaw as a product is that it provides all sorts of miscellaneous research tools, as if it’s aspiring to become its customers new research portal, but it doesn’t provide cost effective (or effective in any shape or form) access to the frickin' newspaper, which is only thing that I think 95% of likely subscribers would care about. But that’s not the only flaw in play here. An esteemed colleague of mine is convinced that in a few years from now, there will be books and business case studies about this afr.com fiasco. How could a supposedly smart company get it so wrong in so many different ways?

I wonder if they thought they could get away with it because they thought, “we’re the Fin, the paper of record in the Australian business community, people will put up with this crap, because they need us.” The answer is no, if you make life too difficult and expensive for your customers, we’ll adapt to life without you. Some day you may realize that actually, it was you who needed the goodwill of your customers and suppliers – and try to win us back. That may work, but maybe by then we’ll have got used to not using the AFR at all.

[14 June 2007 edit: I wrote something else about afr.com here]

when you need to forget the answer to remember the question

If you pride yourself on being competent at finding information, please skip this post. This post is for people who know they screw up sometimes. Oh and by the way, competency can be overrated!

interesting presentations - how to survive having the wrong powerpoint slides

Today I gave two presentations for our starting Executive MBA students. Both of the groups I spoke to were a great audience, but the second presentation for the GDMs went much better than the first, simply because I had the right powerpoint slides for that one! For the first presentation, I found myself staring at the slides for something I had done back in January. Not a fun moment. I decided that the only thing I could do was to do an ad lib mashup between the slides on the screen and the notes I had in front of me. Needless to say, it was not the most polished presentation which I have ever done in my life.

I'm posting the slides of the correct presentation here for a little while, because somebody in the second group requested this and I wanted to make my intended presentation available to the first group.

[4 September 2006 update: To conserve bandwidth, I have removed the link to the powerpoint slides, but if you're interested, drop me an email (my address is in the questions and answers post)]

This may seem like a cautionary tale against relying on things like powerpoint slides. All I can say is that sometimes people do things a certain way because that's what they chose to do. Other times it's not like that and certain formats are just expected.

what do libraries, landscaping, lighting and liqour have in common?

How interesting. While helping a student do some research on the Australian landscaping suppliers market, I discovered that there's another ALIA in Australia which has nothing to do with libraries. Unfortunately for them, the Australian Landscape Industry Association did not get any ALIA domain names.

My curiousity piqued, I then discovered that the Australasian Lighting Industry Association has the alia.com.au domain.

I mustn't forget the Australian Liquor Industry Awards, which are sometimes known as the ALIA awards, but mustn't be confused with these ones.

There's a school in Victoria called Alia Secondary College, although it's website seems to be down right now.

Finally, there's an Alia involved in an Australian scandal, although it's not actually Australian. It is the name of the company which was a front for the previous Iraqi regime. The Australian Wheat Board paid bribes to the Iraqi government through Alia. Well, that's still not as bad as enduring all the Symbionese Liberation Army jokes from a former co-worker whenever I attended an Special Libraries Association function.

research, decision-making and bullshit detection

The following is adapted from some presentations to our Executive MBA group. It's a combination of what I actually said and what I wished I had said. I spoke equally on all four points, but tonight I'm only writing about the fourth one.

Why the research skills you learn in the library are important -

• Authoritative information
• Save time with more precise searching
• Getting a competitive edge with your information
• Bullshit detection

Some people might be thinking, yeah I need to learn this stuff while I'm a student and have these research assignments, but I know that when I'm finished with business school, I can safely forget about it. The reason why I'm taking this course is to prepare me for a leadership position in the company. If I need research, I'll just pay a consultant or somebody else to do it for me. I won't need to do it myself.

For one thing, it is impossible to be in a leadership in business without making decisions. Decision-making has two essential ingredients - information and a brain which processes and analyzes the information. It is possible to make decisions without information but these are invariably poor decisions. To gather the information needed for decision-making, there is no escaping the fact that you need to do research. What I am saying is that the decision-maker has the responsibility to research. As a matter of practicality, the research work is often delegated to an information professional. I am very aware of distinction involved in researching and gathering information to make a decision. I am more than happy to research all the facets of an issue, and giving reasons for and against the various positions. But don't ask me to tell you what to do - you don't pay me enough for that. Giving advice is something I happily eschew, except in a strictly obiter capacity. There are some decisions which only the CEO is placed to make. This is why you need research skills - to identify what you need to know and have an idea of how to find them, or who to ask.

This leads to my other point here. The research skills which you learn in a library will serve you well in your career as a form of bullshit detector. Even if you delegate the research work, as the decision-maker you are still responsible for gathering the information you need. This means you need to be able to critically evaluate the research that is done on your behalf. You need to understand what was done and determine if it's acceptable. One of the best ways of learning how to evaluate the quality of research is to do your own research and learn how the process should work. In your Executive MBA you won't be able to get away with limiting your research to the top 10 hits of a Google search. One of the goals of the course is that you will develop a sense of what is and isn't solid research, so that the next time one of your departments or a consultant tries to palm off some filmsy "research", you will recognize the danger signs.  In these days when information seems so abundant, research is not just about locating information, it's also about filtering and excluding information.

information about electricity and metrology for non-engineers

Generally I have been impressed by the information in South Australian government websites. In my previous job at NEMMCO, I would often refer people to ESCOSA's (Essential Services Commission of South Australia) information about electricity and full retail contestability (FRC). It seemed to be one of the few places to find less-technical information about electricity - stuff that is understandable to people without a degree in electrical engineering or years of experience in the subject. Another helpful publication is NEMMCO's An Introduction to Australia's National Electricity Market.

It's my opinion that within the broad electricity subject, metrology (about electricity metering) would have to be one of the most arcane sub-specialties. This was another place where I found ESCOSA's site to be helpful . The South Australian metrology procedure had a helpful cheatsheet (on page 30 of the pdf document) explaining the differences between the types of meters. It's a little dated now - with references to the now defunct National Electricity Code, and this document will probably disappear entirely within a couple of years when the state-based metrology procedures are replaced with national ones. Still, while it's around, the cheatsheet is helpful and isn't just relevant to South Australia.