The librarian is: BLOGGING | Journalism Library, Columbia University

The Journalism Library Blog has MOVED! This site is no longer being updated as of July 2009. Come find us at our new location:

https://blogs.cul.columbia.edu/journalism

See you there!

Library resources for MA students, handouts from Evidence and Inference course, Fall 2008 -

• Columbia
• Beyond Columbia

Did you miss the Bloomberg training in Journalism? Fear not! The Business & Economics Librarians offer Bloomberg training throughout the year, and there are 2 trainings left for the fall semester -

http://www.columbia.edu/cu/lweb/indiv/business/training.html

The trainings are free, but reservations are required. See the web site for details.

Remember to check back periodically at the Library Classes and Instructional Workshops web site for additional training in a variety of topics in research and technology.

Graduated already? Great news. Columbia University Libraries has just added a new title to the list of online research databases we make available to alumni: EBSCO’s Business Source Premier. This database is a collection of nearly 1100 business magazines and journals in full text.

If you are an alum and have not already registered to gain access to the alumni databases, please see this page for more information.

Factiva and ThomsonONE Banker (access restricted to current Columbia affiliates) are two central sources for doing background research on public companies and on executives. For more business research resources, visit the Business & Economics Library website.

Of particular importance on the site: the 24/7 Help feature is a searchable knowledgebase that guides you through databases and other resources, and the Guides link takes you to research guides on various topics.

ThomsonONE Banker

ThomsonONE Banker is a comprehensive database of company information (as well as data on indices, portfolios, stock markets, and deals). Its interface is quite user-friend for company searches. For more in-depth SEC filings and PDFs of company annual reports, see the companion database, Thomson Research (access restricted to current Columbia affiliates).

Getting the Most out of Factiva

Factiva, a joint product of Dow Jones and Reuters, is a source for the full text of thousands of news sources, including newspapers, wires, broadcast transcripts, and trade publications. It also contains a significant amount of company information, including stock prices, balance sheet information, and lists of competitors within the same sector.

When searching the News portion of Factiva, two types of searching can help to filter your results down to the most useful sources:

Proximity searching:
A proximity search puts search terms within a certain distance of each other in the story, and replaces “AND” as the connector between terms. Some examples:
gates same tuberculosis
(this will find the name Gates in the same paragraph as tuberculosis)
unisys w/10 homeland security
(this will find unisys within 10 words of the phrase homeland security – you can change the number of words to anything between 1 and 10)

Atleast searching:
An atleast search specifies a minimum number of occurrences of a word in a story (to a maximum of 50). It is particularly helpful for finding more in-depth stories, or transcripts of a broadcast on which a particular person was a guest. Example:
robert w/2 chen and atleast8 rae
(this will find Robert within two words of Chen, and at least 8 occurrences of RAE).

Just announced: the spring schedule of training sessions at the Business & Economics Library:

Introduction to Databases and Online Tools

This session will demonstrate web access to business and economics information as available from the Watson Business Library’s webpage.
Wednesday, January 18, 5pm – 6pm Wednesday, January 25, 5pm – 6pm
Friday, January 20, 11am – 12pm Friday, January 27, 11am – 12pm

The class is held in the study space on the west side of the 1st mezzanine of the Business & Economics Library.

Reservations are required: send email to business@libraries.cul.columbia.edu

An Introduction to Bloomberg

This session will teach the basic navigation and searching skills necessary to begin using Bloomberg.
Friday, January 20, 2006, 10am – 11am Friday, March 31, 2006, 10am – 11am
Friday, February 3, 2006, 10am – 11am Friday, April 14, 2006, 10am – 11am
Friday, February 17, 2006, 10am – 11am Friday, April 28, 2006, 10am – 11am

Friday, March 17, 2006, 10am – 11am

The class is held in the study space on the west side of the 1st mezzanine of the Business & Economics Library.

Reservations are required: send email to business@libraries.cul.columbia.edu

This guide to internet resources for business journalists was presented at a workshop of the Society of American Business Editors and Writers.