Editor & Publisher Market Guide

This yearly publication contains a lot of useful information, yet the last three editions, which were still on the shelf when the 2009 edition came in, look untouched. It costs about $170 per year, which, granted, is not a whole lot compared to some of the titles we have reviewed. But think of it as eight $20 bills and a $10--are we throwing this amount away every year?

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The strength of this volume is the large section of market data for US cities that have daily newspapers. This includes, in addition to population and number of households, principal industries, number of banks and amount of deposits, railroads, shopping centers and retail outlets, colleges and universities, names of newspapers and other data. Although much of this information is available on the internet, the convenience here is the collection of these various pieces of information for each city. The sections on Population, Ages and Ethnicity, Housing, Income and Retail sales are more easily found online.

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It also includes Metropolital Statistical Area (MSA) rankings for such things as population, income, cost of living, high school graduation rates. quality of life, retail sales.

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Is this useful enough, and do we get enough requests for this type of information, to justify the price?

Fulltext Sources Online

Fulltext Sources Online is a two volume publication that is updated twice per year (We keep it behind the reference desk). It costs $285 per year.

We just received the new edition, and the July edition, which it replaces, looks untouched by human hands. Whenever I see this, of course, I question whether we should be getting it.

It lists 41,234 publications whose full text can be found in 25 aggregators (like Ebsco, Factiva, JSTOR, Newsbank, etc). It is arranged alphabetically by title of publication, with subject, geographic and language indexes.

Significantly, 36,417 of the entries include URLs, and of these 13,035 contain free archives. This is noted by a special symbol within the entry. Blogs, radio programs, TV transcripts and newsletters are also included and noted as such in the entry as a document type.

Definitely this is a useful resource. But do we get asked for this kind of information enough to justify the price, or do most patrons want to know what we have access to here in the library (which can quickly be answered by our E-Journal magazine list which can be found here http://nc9gr8gh9t.search.serialssolutions.com/ ).

United States Code Annotated (USCA)

I need your opinions quickly on this. The USCA subscription costs us nearly $2500 per year to keep it up to date. It is all online here http://www4.law.cornell.edu/uscode/ and here http://www.gpoaccess.gov/uscode/index.html (although I do find the online hard to use). Do we use the paper edition enough to justify the expense?

I have no plans of getting rid of the NJ Statutes or the NJ Administrative Code. I think we should keep these despite being also online.

The WestLaw pricing for this stuff is very complicated. We pay approximately $300 per month for the WestLaw database, which no one ever uses (and probably never will). However, since we subscribe to that, we get all our print subscriptions at half price, which actually nets us some savings. However, if we cut the print USCA, the database will actually start costing us money, which we cannot justify. So, clear as mud? (Told you it was complicated).

Let me know what you think as soon as possible, since we have to make a decision on this by Friday 1/30.

Marquis Who's Who on the Web

This week we are looking at a database. Marquis Who's Who on the Web costs $1195 per year. We also still get the paper copy which costs $354 per year. This database is only available within the library. There is no remote access.

As usual, the question is, do we use this enough to make it worth the price? And when we do use it, does it retrieve informtion that answers questions? Is there enough unique information here that is not available in the paper copy? Can we give up the paper copy?

Usage stats are as follows: Jan 4; Feb 8; Mar 11; April 5; May 25; June 15; July 1; Aug 3; Sept 15; Oct 3; Nov 26 (when KF was researching it for her biographical databytes). Unfortunately the way the stats only record searches; they do not record if information was retrieved in the search.

In this year of cutbacks, is this a critical and necessary database? For your information, I have just renewed the Gale Biographical Resource database at the whopping cost of $ 3098 per year (however this does have remote access). At KF's biographical databytes it was generally agreed that this is a critical and necessary database.

United Nations Statistical Yearbook

At $160 per year, this is not a real big ticket item, yet when I replaced the old edition this year with the new one, it looked like it had never been opened, let alone used. Why don't we use it? Do we not remember it's there? Do we not get asked for this information? Is it readily available on the internet?

It is in both English and French (on the same page) and has a total of 69 tables divided into four parts:

World and region summary includes population, production, trade and finance statistics for the world as a whole and regions of the world such as Europe and Asia, but not specific countries.

Population and social statistics includes statistics on population, education, nutrition and childbearing, and communications for individual countries.

Economic activity, at 465 pages and by far the largest section, includes statistics on wages and prices, labor force, industrial production, manufacturing, energy and the environment, etc. for individual countries.

International economic relations includes tables on international tourism, development assistance, balance of payments, etc.

Appendixes or annexes trace country or area name changes, which countries are included in specific regions and conversion tables.

This can be frustrating to use because of the difficulty in collecting similar statistics for all countries, but, of course, that is no fault of this resource. For example, it is impossible to find out the female population of Chad, because only the total population is counted, and the latest for that is 1993. The difficulty and obstacles encountered in collecting these statistics is illustrated by the four pages of fine print foot notes following the country population table, and it is helpful to know why needed information does not exist.

All things considered, it is good and reliable resource. But, should be continue to get it?

Ref 000 Shelf Clearing

I have just finished going through the entire Ref 000 collection. On the cart are items that are up for discard. Some individual explanations:

Whitakers Almanac and Time Almanac--we stopped this as a standing order. Probably not a good idea to keep these old issues there?

Farmers Almanac we are keeping, but do we really need all these back issues there? I kept 2007, 2008, 2009.

Magazines for Libraries is nearly 10 years old. A few things have changed in the magazine world during that time.

International Organizations we cancelled as a standing order in 2003. The 39th ed, which is 2002 seems a little old to be useful. The same is true for World of Learning, Official Museum Directory, American Book Trade Directory and ILMP.

Although I have actually used American Book Prices Current several times, the volumes we have are becoming increasingly outdated.

Is there anything on this cart that you would like to save? Also, is there anything there that you think we should resubscribe to? Also, take a look at what I have left on the shelf to see if you think there are anymore items that should be discarded.

Printed Stock Information Products

This week we're going to take a look at three printed stock information products.

The first is Trendline: Current Market Perspectives, a monthly publication that we have in our magazine section. The cost is $655 per year. It includes quick 1/6 page snapshot summaries of about 2400 stocks, plus charts such as the 70 best and worst performing and fastest growing stocks for the month, top yielding stocks, best industry performers, etc. It also includes a stock and industry comparator which shows price changes in companies' stock by industry.

The second is another S & P stock publication--Stock Reports which gives more information (a full page of tiny print) on approximately 3000 stocks, but it is only updated quarterly, and does not have the ranking and comparison charts. The cost is a whopping $4,185 per year.

The third is Value Line (not an S & P product) which has information similar to S & P Stock Reports on about 3500 stocks. The regular and small and mid-cap together cost $1,047.

So, I guess the question is, what do we need in the way of printed stock information? I'll be interested to hear your thoughts.