Tales from the Terminal Room

April 2003, Issue No. 42

Archives

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Tales from the Terminal Room (TFTTR) is a monthly newsletter, with the exception of July and August, which are published as a single issue. TFTTR includes reviews and comparisons of information sources and search tools; updates to the RBA Web site Business Sources and other useful resources; dealing with technical and access problems on the Net; and news of RBA's training courses and publications.

In this issue:

• Online 2003 Call for Papers
• Price's List of Lists Moves to Specialissues.com
• Information Resources
  • Independent charges for content
  • Insight Research Corporation
  • International Business Strategies
  • Best for Business
  • CDA Dorset (Co-operative Development Agency)
  • Grantsnet: UK grants and funding information
  • CAROL re-launches with credit report facility
  • Top 10 Sources of Business Information
• Gizmo of the Month
  • Allwhois - the name behind the domain
• Meetings and Workshops
  • Key Business Sources on the Internet (Manchester Business School)
  • Advanced Internet Search Strategies (Manchester Business School)

Online 2003 Call for Papers

The Online Information 2003 Committee has issued a Call for Papers for this year's Online Information conference to be held in London on 2nd - 4th December. As a guideline, these are some of the proposed themes for the 2003 conference:

• Information strategy and information integrity
• Information metrics, quantity analysis, user statistics
• Content management
• Information architecture and taxonomies
• Professional development for the information professional
• Information literacy and the information society
• Search and retrieval tools and techniques
• Communities and collaboration
• Wireless, mobile and virtual working
• Portals, Intranets, Extranets: information integration
• Digital library developments and the virtual reference desk

Further information and instructions can be found at http://www.imark.co.uk/ol03/conf_expertise.html. Alternatively email Catherine Graham, the Conference Editor, at cgraham@imark.co.uk

The official deadline for receipt of proposals was Friday 2 May 2003 but has been extended.

Price's List of Lists Moves to Specialissues.com

Gary Price's List of Lists (LOL) is now being maintained and updated by Specialissues.com (http://www.specialissues.com/). The LOL, started in 1998, is a database of ranked listings of companies, people and resources freely available on the Internet.

The LOL is organized by subject headings based on the two-digit 1997 U.S. NAICS Codes. There is no formal search function but you can search for content within each of the subject headings using your browser's "Find" option.

The subject of the rankings can be anything and range from the top 100 European banks to the top 25 ice cream flavours! There are some European and International rankings, but there is a heavy US bias.

Information Resources

News http://www.rba.co.uk/sources/news.htm

Independent charges for content
The Independent (http://www.independent.co.uk/) is the latest UK broadsheet to start charging for news archives and some current Web content. This leaves only the Guardian (http://www.guardian.co.uk/) and the Telegraph (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/) providing free access to both current and archive news.

The priced "Independent Portfolio" covers all articles by regular columnists and commentators, leading articles from The Independent and Independent on Sunday, all articles by Middle East Correspondent Robert Fisk, all articles more than seven days old in the news and sport channels, Cryptic Crossword and the six-month archive of crosswords.

There is a range of tariffs:

• GBP 1/item pay as you go access for 24 hours
• GBP 5 monthly subscription per section (first trial month free)
• GBP 30 annual subscription per section
• GBP 60 annual subscription to all Portfolio content
• Payment has to be made using a BT Click&Buy account.

Note: There will be a review and comparison of UK news sources on the Web in the May issue of TFTTR.

Market Research http://www.rba.co.uk/sources/mr.htm

Insight Research Corporation http://www.insight-corp.com/
Insight is a telecommunications industry analysis firm based in New Jersey, USA. It produces market research reports and provides custom consulting for telecom carriers, vendors, and service providers.

Insight offers three types of telecom market research services:

1. Off the shelf market research reports available in hard copy or as PDF files. Current topics include OSS, photonics, broadband access, switching, and telecom services in vertical markets.
2. A subscription service offering unlimited corporate-wide distribution, analyst inquiry, executive summaries and an email newsletter
3. Custom research

You can search for reports using the keyword search option or browse by topic and year of publication.

International Business Strategies http://www.internationalbusinessstrategies.com/
International Business Strategies offers current International market research reports and forecasts on over 130 topics from more than 75 countries. Reports include market size information, market access strategies, market share, export and import information, regulations, distribution and business practices, trade shows and contact points.

You can browse by country, topic or report title, or search using keywords.

Support for SMEs http://www.rba.co.uk/sources/sme.htm

Best for Business http://www.bestforbusiness.com/
This service has been created by the staff at Business Insight, Central Library, Birmingham. Best for Business provides free business information covering all topics, with a slight West Midlands bias for more specific services such as grants and tenders. There are over 500 fact sheets on the site under the Business Advice heading as well as Know How guides. In the Research section, there is an excellent collection of annotated links to business information resources on the Web.

CDA Dorset http://www.cda-dorset.com/
The Co-operative Development Agency (CDA) is a local development agency providing free information, business advice, funding and marketing support to anyone interested in setting up a co-operative in and around Dorset. Their aim is to support the development of a thriving, sustainable co-operative and social enterprise sector in the area.

Their services include:

• business advice
• types of co-operative
• other social enterprise structures
• exploring funding opportunities
• networking with similar groups, locally and nationally

The site has a list of co-ops and social enterprises in the Dorset area and there is also a list of links to useful information.

Grantsnet: UK grants and funding http://www.grantsnet.co.uk/
Grantsnet is a new service that pulls together information on grants sponsored by central government, local government, the European Union, the National Lottery, and many charitable trusts. Grants are either administered directly by the sponsor, or by organisations working for the sponsor.

The service is free to use and there is a four step search process: type of organisation (profit or not for profit), country (England, Northern Ireland, Scotland, Wales), region and project/business sector type. It is not as comprehensive as Grantfinder (http://www.grantfinder.co.uk) or J4b (http://www.j4b.co.uk) but does seem to have some unique content and information.

Company Financials and Annual Reports http://www.rba.co.uk/sources/finars.htm

CAROL re-launches with credit report facility
CAROL (http://www.carol.co.uk/) has revamped its Web site and, in addition to links to company annual reports and accounts, is now offering credit reports.

CAROL provides links to the financial pages of listed companies' Web sites in Europe and the USA. The links to Asian companies that were present on the previous incarnation of the Web site have gone. Where available, you can access companies' balance sheets, profit & loss statements, financial highlights etc. on the companies' own Web sites. Access to this section is free of charge but you do have to register.

For UK registered companies you can now purchase credit reports and document images, which you can download immediately. The reports that are available include:

• Corporate Analysis Level 3 - GBP40+VAT
  This is the most comprehensive report "drawing on up to 8 different sources of information to compile itself".
• Credit Profile - GBP18+VAT
  A four year financial overview as well as credit information.
• Images of Accounts or Annual Returns - GBP 14 + VAT
  The full imaged documents as filed at Companies House.

The new site is very slick but there are some irritating design features. Two of my colleagues complained that they could not increase the size of the text (I had no problems resizing with Mozilla), and the colour combinations made some blocks of text very difficult to read.

My own main gripe is that the links to company Web sites open up the pages in a frame within the CAROL Web site. This means that if you want to explore the rest of the company site and beyond you are stuck with the CAROL banners at the top of the page. In two instances, this "feature" resulted in an error message telling me "Redirection limit of this URL exceeded. Unable to load the requested page".

The links from CAROL to the Web sites are embedded within Javascript making it impossible to open the pages within a new window by right- clicking with the mouse. Only when the target company's page has loaded can you use the right click option to get out of the CAROL frames. The companies included in the CAROL index may well have given permission for their pages to be loaded into CAROL branded frames, but there is the issue of the owners of other sites that are linked to by these companies. They may take a very dim view of appearing to be branded as part of the CAROL site.

Top 10 Business Information Sites http://www.rba.co.uk/sources/top10/

The following were voted the "Top 10" sources of business information by delegates who attended the latest Business Information on the Net workshop:

1. Factiva http://www.factiva.com/ - information on companies, markets and news. Priced service with a pay-as-you-go option for news.
2. Companies House http://www.companieshouse.gov.uk/ - essential starting point for information on UK registered companies. Basic directory type information is free: company documents are priced.
3. LexisNexis http://www.lexis-nexis.co.uk/ - information on companies, markets and news. Priced service with a pay-as-you-go option.
4. Yahoo! Finance - http://www.yahoo.co.uk/ (click on the Finance link) - free share price information and news on listed companies, including historical share prices.
5. Allwhois - http://allwhois.com/ - useful service for checking who owns a domain name as part of information quality assessment.
6. BBC News http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/ - access to current and archive news on events world-wide plus links to background information and relevant sites. Free service.
7. Official Statistics on the Web http://www.auckland.ac.nz/lbr/stats/offstats/OFFSTATSmain.htm
   One of the best starting point for statistical sources by country, topic or subject.
8. Corporate Information http://www.corporateinformation.com/ - useful listing of sites by country and/or markets covering stock exchanges, company directories and sector based sites.
9. Google http://www.google.com/ - general Web search tool also providing access to Usenet, news and image searching.
10. Marketresearch.com http://www.marketresearch.com/ - provides access to over 50,000 market research reports from 350 content providers. Priced pay-as-you-go service.

Gizmo of the Month

AllWhois - the name behind the domain

http://allwhois.com/

Knowing who has written an article, or who is responsible for the content on a Web site, is an essential part of assessing the quality of information. There are occasions, though, when there are no clues as to the authorship of a document on the Web, or who is really behind a Web site. This is where "whois" can be of real help.

"Whois" is an Internet directory service for looking up names. It was once used to find e-mail addresses but is now primarily used to look up domain name ownership information. If you are looking at a Web site with its own domain name, for example www.superwidgets.co.uk, you can usually find out who owns that domain name from a search in a "whois".

Allwhois.com claims to be "the most complete whois service on the Internet". There are different "whois" databases depending on the country and type of domain, for example commercial, government, academic. Allwhois automatically locates the appropriate "whois" database server for a particular domain name, queries that database, and returns all available data.

The information typically includes the name of the owner of the domain name (an individual or a company), a contact name, address, an administrative contact, technical contact and when the record was created or updated.

The registered owner of a domain name will not always be responsible for providing the content of a Web site, but at least it is a starting point for further investigation.

Meetings & Workshops

Workshop: Key Business Sources on the Internet
Organiser: Manchester Business School
Course leader: Karen Blakeman
Venue: Manchester Business School
Date: Thursday, 22nd May 2003
URL: http://www.mbs.ac.uk/corporate/bis/html/training.cfm
Cost: GBP 250 + VAT; GBP 215 + VAT (BINN/MBS Members)

TFTTR Contact Information

Karen Blakeman, RBA Information Services
UK Tel: 0118 947 2256, Int. Tel: +44 118 947 2256
UK Fax: 020 8020 0253, Int. Fax: +44 20 8020 0253
Address: 88 Star Road, Caversham, Berks RG4 5BE, UK

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