Standard & Poor's Industry Surveys

Standard & Poor's Industry Surveys is a 3 volume set arranged alphabetically by 52 broad industry groups. Each industry is updated twice annually. The cost per year of this subscription is $2462.

Each industry entry, averaging about 40 pages, starts with a discussion of the current environment of the industry, followed by an industry profile, a glossary of industry terms, trade journals and associations, and a 3-4 page comparative analysis of companies within the industry. The charts within each industry are interesting. For example, in Environmental & Waste Management, charts include U.S.recycling rates for common materials, percent of various materials in municipal solid waste, landfill capacity, etc.

The first 125 pages are repeated in each volume and include an alphabetical index to all companies mentioned within the industry surveys, industry subsector valuations and summaries, and S&P GICS Composite 1500 Component Statistics.

OneSource also has a great deal of industry information, but it's strength is the depth of information on various aspects of industries, for example analysts reports and market share information. There is no place within OneSource to get a summary of the industry (at least that I could find). The strength of this set, then, is having all of this information in one place, readable and understandable in a logical, linear fashion.

So, what's the verdict?

Annual Register of Grant Support and The Grants Register

This time we're doing two titles since they are closely related.

Annual Register of Grant Support was $252 for the 2008edition. Basically, it gives information on grant support programs of public and private foundations, corporations, community trusts, unions, educational and professional associations, special interest organizations and government agencies. The information included for each organization includes among other things, areas of interest, names of special programs, eligibility requirements, representative awards, and more. The scope of the entries is US and Canadian.

The entries are arranged by 11 broad subject areas with subheadings under most. There are separate subject, geographical, personnel, organization and program indexes. There is a useful explanation of types of grant sources, and a 10 page guide to program planning and proposal writing. This edition has a binding error--it skips from page 1264 to 1337. These missing pages are at the end of the volume after a number of empty pages for notes.

The Grants Register is international in scope and is now edited in the UK. The cost for the 2008 ed was $303. Entries are arranged alphabetically by name of organization. There is also a subject/eligibility guide which is arranged by 19 broad subject areas, each of which have narrower subheadings. Each subject area is subdivided into elegibility by nationality. There is also an alphabetical index of award names.

The information given for each entry is similar to Grant Support but tends to be more brief. A spot check revealed a great deal of overlap in the US entries (approximately half), but at least half of the entries are not US, but are rather from the other 61 countries included.

The question is, do we need both of these sources, in addition to the Foundation Directory? The obvious advantage to The Grants Register is its international scope, but is there enough demand for this coverage in this community. Do we need them every year? None of this information is readily available on the web (at least that I could find).

Also, they have two entirely different call numbers. Grant Support is 001.44 and Grants Register 378.3. Foundation Directory is in yet another--361.7632. Any ideas on whether these sources should be together or remain as they are?

Corfacts New Jersey Business Directories

These two directories, New Jersey Business to Business Directory and New Jersey Directory of Small Businesses, are published by Corfacts, a local competitor of InfoUSA. Check out their website here http://www.corfactsonline.com/ You can see that their online product aims to do the same things as RefUSA. This is their printed product. Each directory costs approximately $250.

Each directory has two volumes, and the format is the same for both. Volume 1 has an alphabetical index which lists only the name of the business, the county and the city. This is followed by a geographical index listed by county and then by town. Information given is brief and includes, in addition to contact information, number of employees by range (e.g., 1-5; 6-10, etc) and revenue also by range, plus a very brief description of what the company does. Volume 2 has the companies arranged by SIC code.

Previously in this blog, I have tried not to influence you with my opinion on a particular title. However, for this one it will be hard to do that, because, for the life of me, I cannot see that it has any advantages over RefUSA, which does everything better, and is much more extensive. For example, when looking for companies in Pennington with under 10 employees, RefUSA had 627 and this directory had less than 100.

Another problem is the sloppiness of the data. For example, in each set there is a handy zip code directory by county before the geographical section. Handy, that is, if the zip codes were correct. The first two I checked, Pennington and Camden, were both incorrect. Also this past year we had a great deal of difficulty in getting a good set. The first shipment had a whole section of incorrect data, as did the second shipment. The third was finally correct.

So, what I want to hear from you are any reasons you may have for keeping this that I may have overlooked.

Standard and Poor's Statistical Service

This is a subscription service costing $1480 per year (for 2008) with three components:

Current Statistics: This contains a complete 12 month record of the daily high, low and close of S&P stock price indices, plus a 12 month record of weekly indices of several Global Industry Classification Standard (GICS) industry groups such as banking and finance, production and labor, building, electric power and fuels, etc. These should come out once per month, but they are behind--the latest is 10/07, which we received in mid-February (a call to customer service confirmed that this is indeed the latest and they are indeed behind). Of concern is the fact that some of the stats are not up-to-date, for example, the Prime Rate charged by banks (p. 4 of the yellow) is only listed through 1/31/05, and I was able to find later data on the Federal Reserve web page. Also of concern is the fact that the index on page 2 does not always show the correct page numbers.

Basic Statistics: These give historical statistics for the same GICS categories as the Current Statistics section. This is the weakest part of the subscription. These are updated rarely, and some are as old as 1994. A call to customer service indicated that no updates are forthcoming in the near future. This makes for gaps in data. For example "Gross Domestic Product, National Income, and Personal Income" on page 7 of Current Statistics covers data for 2005 and 2006. It refers the user to pages 97-101 of the Basic Statistics which gives data for 1946-1994. There is no way to get the intervening years (the call to customer service also confirmed this).

Security Price Index Record: This comes out biennially and traces the movement of stock and bond prices by GICS industry group. The data goes back to 1941. I was not able to find this data on the web, however, a spot check of a number of the tables included in Current Statistics revealed that a fair amount of this data is available on the web.

If you have not used this in a while (as I hadn't), take some time to reacquaint yourself with it, and let me know if you think it is worth the price. How much of this can we get on the web? Do we have enough demand for the data that isn't? It might be possible to get it every other year (the year Security Price Index Record comes out).