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Entrepreneurship in the key of Jazz – noonartsound in the library

April 2, 2019   Noon to 1 pm    O’Shaughnessy-Frey Library, Room 108     

All are welcome – refreshments will be provided

“Improvisation, creativity, agility, and the ability to create and innovate under conditions of turbulence and uncertainty are central not only to the jazz process, but also the entrepreneurial process.  Join us as we explore these and other surprising similarities between jazz and entrepreneurship, as well as the lessons that both of these fascinating, complex, and collaborative activities have to offer one another.”    – Dr. Steve Cole

Alec Johnson, Entrepreneurship

 

Alec Johnson:   Alec Johnson, whose primary teaching interest is Innovation has taught for 18 years at the University of St. Thomas in Entrepreneurship. He is a Julie Hays Teacher of the Year (Opus Business School), and owns several businesses including his freelance photography business (www.acjfineartphoto.com).

 

 

Dr. Steve Cole
Head of Music Industry Studies and Recording Arts

 

Steve Cole:   Dr. Steve Cole is Head of Music Industry Studies and Recording Arts at the University of St. Thomas.  As a jazz musician (saxophonist) Dr. Cole has eight major label solo releases, and has published over 150 original works.  His research in organization development & change explores how music based interventions can build individual and organizational capacity for creativity, agility, and  dynamic capability.

 

 

 

 

 

March 18, 2019 by
Business & Economics, Database Highlights & Trials, New Materials

UST libraries will cancel Nexis Uni, and replace it with Westlaw Campus Research

 

The University of St. Thomas Libraries subscribe to databases and electronic materials based on curricular needs and faculty requests.  We are continually watching for products that address these needs with relevant, easy-to-access content.  One long-standing need is legal information for students who are not in law school.  For example, students studying business or social work may require primary and secondary legal information on a variety of topics in their disciplines.   Lexis Nexis, now known as Nexis Uni, has long been our database for that type of legal information, as well as providing national and international news sources and public company information.  However, this database has never been easy to search or navigate, so we have been looking for another database that can provide the same information.  We have finally found one, Westlaw Campus Research.

Westlaw is a reputable database, and a staple in law libraries across the country.  The Westlaw Campus Research is designed for academic research across the disciplines.  Along with legal materials, it also contains thousands of full-text news sources, and information about public companies.  The decision to cancel Nexis Uni and replace it with Westlaw was made after careful consideration and a trial of the database during which librarians gathered feedback from students and faculty. The response to Westlaw was positive, especially around the interface and ease of searching.  We understand that this is a big change and are committed to working with you to make that transition as easy as possible. Our subscription to Nexis Uni will end on July 1, 2018.  Access to Westlaw Campus Research is expected to begin by June 2018, so you will have some time when both are available.  And for current local and international news sources updated daily, the UST libraries subscribe to Access World News and ProQuest Global Newsstream.  Both databases provide access to thousands of news sources that can be searched by topic, Access World News can also be searched by region.  If there is anything that your subject librarian can do in order to assist you in using these databases, or to understand the materials in Westlaw, please let us know.

 

May 7, 2018 by
Business & Economics, Database Highlights & Trials, Libraries

Database trial: Simmons Local Consumer Insights

We now have a trial for Simmons Local Consumer Insights, as an addition to our Simmons OneView subscription (we are limited to 5 simultaneous users.) Simmons OneView provides data on adult U.S. consumers based on national surveys, and covers a wide variety of products, brands, and services. (There’s more information on how to use Simmons OneView on our Simmons OneView library guide.)

The Local Consumer Insights lets you view this information for all of the U.S.’s 209 Nielsen media markets, or DMAs (we are in the Minneapolis-St. Paul DMA.) Once you’ve logged in, to get the local data, click on the Study tab, then choose the area/DMA that you want.

Simmons Local Consumer Insights

Wondering about local pizza chain preferences? Let’s compare Domino’s and Pizza Hut.

Simmons Local Domino’s & Pizza Hut

This trial runs through November 17, 2017. Please send your comments on this resource to Marianne Hageman.

October 23, 2017 by
Business & Economics, Database Highlights & Trials, News & Events

Simmons OneView trial

We now have a trial for Simmons OneView – just click OK when it says we have no challenge question.) Simmons is a database of consumer demographic information (formerly known as the Simmons Study of Media and Markets); it provides national survey data from the Simmons National Consumer Study and the National Hispanic Consumer Study. These studies include demographic and psychographic characteristics, including attitudes and shopping habits, of product users. They have several YouTube tutorials; a good one to start with is “Create, Export & Save a CrossTab.”

We are comparing this to MRI University Reporter. A big difference between them is that unlike MRI, Simmons OneView has no “canned” reports. Users can choose their variables, which makes it more powerful, but there is more of a learning curve.

Our trial to Simmons OneView runs through November 17. Please send your comments on this resource to Marianne Hageman.

simmonsoneview

October 14, 2016 by
Business & Economics, Database Highlights & Trials, News & Events

Trial – eMarketer

This month we are trialing a marketing and advertising resource called eMarketer. It provides market data, statistics, and analysis including trends in e-business, mobile, social media, and online advertising. The data can be used to look at consumer behavior and market size. eMarketer includes articles, analyst reports, and statistical tables which can be downloaded to Excel for further analysis.

emarketer

This trial runs through 10/27/2016. Please send your comments on this resource to Marianne Hageman.

October 3, 2016 by
Art, Business & Economics, English, Latin America, Libraries, Modern Languages, News & Events, Science

Welcome Back!

Welcome back to campus, everyone! It was so fun to cheer on the class of 2018 as they marched through the arches yesterday, and today it’s great to see the Quad filled with smiling faces as we all reconnect and get geared up for a wonderful academic year.

We hope you had a fun summer! Things were busy around here at the library and, as usual, we have some fun news to share.

As you gear up for your fall research projects, remember to check out our handy Subject Guides – what I like to call handy “mini library websites” geared specifically towards your course and subject content (and I’m not making that up – we  work with your professors to make sure we have what you need to do your assignments!).

We’re also happy to report that Summon, our popular library search engine, has received an upgrade that we hope will make it easy to use.  Some highlights we’ve heard students liking already include: recommendations of subject specialists based on what you’re searching, automatic breakdown of content by type (like Google does), and more.  Check it out and let us know what you think! 

We’ve also added many more online resources, including these favorites of mine:

  • ASTM Standards and Engineering Digital Library – a collection of industry-leading standards and technical engineering information
  • Digitalia Hispánica – database of e-books and e-journals in Spanish and English, with access to some of the most renowned publishers in Spain and Latin America
  • Early English Books Online – primary source collection featuring English-language books, pamphlets, tracts and ephemera printed between 1473 – 1700
  • Literature Online (“LION”) – criticism and reference resources as well as full text of poetry, drama, and prose fiction from the 8th century to the present day
  • Nature – we have expanded our subscription to the journal “Nature” to include archives going back to 1987

And, of course, we have much more!

As I like to joke, you can stick a quarter in me and I’d go on and on about all of the wonderful resources we have here at the UST Libraries, but I know we’re all busy so I’ll stop here.  Instead, make an appointment with your favorite librarian today find out more about what we have to help you with your research today!

September 3, 2014 by
Business & Economics, Database Highlights & Trials

Job-hunting? Company information search tips

Target Corporation SWOT Analysis

Target Corp. SWOT Analysis


As the temperatures warm up and we move through spring, our thoughts turn fondly to – well, for many students, you’re thinking about job-hunting. You’re thinking about potential employers, maybe you have some interviews lined up. You want to know more about a company as a potential employer, and you want to go beyond what you find on the company’s website and some quick web searching. If you’re a business student, you’ve probably done a good deal of company research for class projects. But if you haven’t done it recently, or aren’t a business student, here are some tips and suggestions.

  • Get a good overview. Business Insights: Essentials and Business Source Premier are great places to check for a basic overview of a public company (one that sells stock or other registered securities to the public.) This can include a description of the company, financial information, and news stories. BSP, BIE, and OneSource Global Business Browser include SWOT reports, which summarize Strengths and Weaknesses of a business, and the Opportunities and Threats it faces in the business environment.
  • Focus your search. BSP and ABI/INFORM Trade & Industry each have a way to search for items about a company that’s more precise than keyword searching. This helps a lot with companies like Target or even Google, whose names are part of daily life. (The word “target,” for example, can refer to target markets, target dates, target-based pay, and of course target practice.) In BSP, you can use the pull-down menu to search for Target as a “company entity,” to get articles specifically about Target the company. And in ABI, you can search for Target as a “company/organization.”
  • Find those private companies, too. As mentioned in an earlier blog post, PrivCo is our newest business resource, covering privately-held companies that average around $50,000,000.00 in annual revenue. For smaller companies, ReferenceUSA is a “business phone book” covering 24 million U.S. businesses. In the Custom Search, you can look for companies by name, business type, business size, location, and more.
  • Don’t forget the news. Yeah, you can find news on the web, but some precision searching can help here as well. ProQuest Newsstand, like ABI, lets you search for articles on a “company/organization.” That helps focus your search in local news sources, like the Star Tribune or Pioneer Press, as well as major papers from other cities (the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, and the Los Angeles Times, just to drop a few names.) And my good friend BizLink has full-text coverage of 40 regional business journals, including the Minneapolis-St. Paul Business Journal and business journals from Atlanta, Denver, Milwaukee, Portland, and Silicon Valley. It’s a great place to search for information on local or regional companies, and you get that local perspective that you don’t find in national sources.

    • Be sure to check our career and employment resources guide as part of your job search. And good luck!

    March 25, 2014 by
    Business & Economics

    Harvard Business Review removes full access to selected articles

    It has become a depressingly common question this semester at the reference desk. I am asked why a permanent link to an article is coming up with an error message, or a user sees this message on an article she wants for a class.

    harvard

     

    I look at the citation and sure enough the answer is staring at me right in the face. The Harvard Business Review is a long standing, respected publication, that covers a wide range of business topics and articles are assigned readings in many undergraduate and graduate classes. Business Source Premier is the only database at UST that provides the electronic access to the Harvard Business Review starting from 1922 up until the present issue. I remember very clearly in the early 2000’s when the UST libraries decided to to make the switch from our then full text business article database, ABI INFORM to Business Source Premier from the vendor Ebsco.  The librarians debated the merits of both products, we conducted surveys, and finally one of the main reasons we switched was because of the full text access to HBR that we knew our users wanted.

    Fast forward to August 1st 2013 when the publishers of HBR started to block full access to their most popular articles like the one you see above.  Professors can no longer link to these articles from their Blackboard page, and while users can view the articles when they find them in Business Source Premier, they can no longer print or save the articles in front of them.  There is no established list of these 500 articles, users will have to just cross their fingers when they click on an article from HBR that the article they want is not on that mysterious list.

    This issue with Harvard goes beyond UST, and it is not going unnoticed.  The Chronicle of Education published a very comprehensive article describing the circumstances and potential impact of this situation, while business and reference library associations issued their own response to Harvard’s policy.   Recently I shared an article with an OCB faculty member who was not able to link to an HBR article and she replied ‘I would not want to be on the wrong side of librarians.’  I was very flattered by her response and gratified that she perceived librarians as facilitating access to information.  So when this access is denied for whatever reason, then yes, you do not want to be on that wrong side.

    November 12, 2013 by
    Business & Economics

    Industry information: new and improved!

    “New and improved” is one of those standard tag lines in business, but we really have seen some cool industry stuff lately in our business resources. Fans of IBISWorld, that great source for mid-level industry overviews, may have noticed an increasing number of OD reports. Now these aren’t “ODD” reports, they’re “OD,” which stands for On Demand. Businesses order these reports from IBISWorld and, once they’re delivered to the client, IBIS can resell them. There are about 600 of them now, in addition to the 700+ regular reports in IBIS. St. Thomas pays a little extra for them, and they’re worth it. Besides 3D Printer Manufacturing (OD4428) and Ethnic Supermarkets (OD4333), where else would you look for reports on Sports Video Game Publishing (OD4860) and my personal favorite, Chocolate Stores (OD5339)? One can only say that the revenue outlook is Sweet.

    IBISWorldChocolate2

    Another resource near and dear to the hearts of business researchers is ABI/INFORM Trade & Industry. Despite its less-than-glamorous name, ABI Trade is a great source for high fashion news, as well as market trends, and product announcements of all sorts. This is due to its great coverage of trade journals, which is a publication covering, and intended to reach, a specific industry or type of business. ABI also has a bunch of industry reports, which until recently have not been easy to find. But now you can search them more easily through ABI’s Data & Reports tab, or best of all, browse them through the Browse tab:

    ABITrade1

    Here’s an example, Food and Drink:

    AmericasFoodandDrink

    As we move toward project deadlines and the end of fall semester, keep a warm place in your heart for industry overviews. Well, maybe not. But keep them in mind for your research projects, and spring job-hunting.

    October 31, 2013 by