Steve Ely

Resource review : HPL business databases

Some observations about a few of the business databases offered by the Houston Public Library:

1.  infoUSA’s ReferenceUSA, Dun & Bradstreet’s Million Dollar Database, and Factiva from Dow Jones each are powerful tools for getting data about companies.   A few advantages and disadvantages of each stand out at a glance.

• ReferenceUSA covers rather more fields in any given record.  Some elements included that I particularly like include the Company News, Competitors Report, Business Expenditures, Nearby Businesses, UCC filings, and Public Filings.  None of these are available on the record for the same company in the Million Dollar Database.
• The MDB does have brief biographies of the executives, though, which the others do not.
• Factiva has almost nothing in a company record that the the other two don’t.  It lacks the executive bios of the MDB and the Business Expenditures, Nearby Businesses, UCC filings, and Public Filings of Reference USA.  It does have a Peer Group section similar to the Competitors Report of ReferenceUSA.  It also has a NewsBrief section that rivals or bests that from ReferenceUSA.  This is only fair, since Factiva has a parallel purpose for news article searching.
• While any given company record in the MDB may be in many ways less extensive than in ReferenceUSA, there are many more company records in the MDB, which notes in its “About” section that it covers 23 million companies.  ReferenceUSA says on its own “About Us” section that it contains information on 14 million U.S. businesses and 1.5 million Canadian businesses.
• In addition, though, ReferenceUSA has residential listings for 210 million U.S. residents and 12 million Canadian households, which the MDB doesn’t.  Naturally, it can’t track that many people perfectly.  I can find my brother-in-law and father, easily enough, for instance, but I don’t seem to be in there myself.  I wonder if having a land telephone line makes a difference.

2.  The help/support feature for Factiva seems to be badly broken.  It will allow you to search for FAQ articles, but no matter which one you select, when you click on the link, the screen says, “Invalid Article ID.“  Come on, Dow Jones!  You’re letting us all down.  Is this Rupert Murdoch’s fault?

3.  Speaking of broken things, the link for OneSource on the HPL subject listing of business databases actually points to ReferenceUSA, which made me wonder if the former actually turned into the latter.  It doesn’t appear so.  Then I noticed that the HPL alphabetical listing of all databases actually doesn’t list OneSource at all, so this could be screwed up in any of a few different ways.

4.  Like Factiva, Gale’s Business & Company Resource Center allows searching for both company records and news articles.  Also of value for company records are Mergent Online and Hoover’s and for articles, popular and scholarly, are EBSCO’s Business Source Complete and Gale’s InfoTrac variations, such as InfoTrac Small Business Collection.  Comparisons of these will wait until another time.