The stalwarts of business information
Jinfo Blog

27th May 2009

By Penny Crossland

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Information professionals are constantly trying to keep up-to-date with where and how to find reliable and freely available sources on the web. In our attempts to keep abreast of current digital content, it is easy to forget the importance of historical information. Last week, Proquest, the owner of Dialog and Datastar announced that more than 300 new sources had been added to business information stalwart ABI/Inform (http://digbig.com/4ytek) , while another Dialog database, Periodical Abstracts Plus had recently gained a further 400 sources. A look at ABI/Inform’s key facts (http://digbig.com/4ytej) reminds us of the value of intelligently abstracted sources combined with a sophisticated search technology. With some ABI sources going back to 1923 (!), results are displayed in abstract and full text formats ( for 50% of sources) and can include images and graphics. Apart from the major newspapers, journals and periodicals, content is also sourced from dissertations, country reports, scholarly papers and SWOT analyses. Periodical Abstracts Plus (http://digbig.com/4ytem) contains full-text articles from humanities, social science and general science sources, with some documents available in PDF format. As Dialog General Manager, Suzanne DeBell says in the press release accompanying the announcement of new content, ‘info pros are not just looking for any information, but for the nugget that no one has seen before and that adds the right insight’. ‘Googling’ for information does not provide the same reliable results – a fact often not acknowledged by some of our internal and external customers. Search engines are a long way from producing the relevant results that are provided by the databases that have set the gold standard in business information.

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