Black History Month and library resources for business

Lippincott Library has many resources about Black entrepreneurs and business. Here’s some suggestions to get started with your research.

Try searching Franklin for African American business enterprises or African American businesspeople for a list of titles such as Encyclopedia of African American Business [Updated and Revised Edition [2 Volumes].

Looking for companies with minority ownership? Data Axle, a detailed company directory, allows you do an advanced search by executive ethnicity. You can combine this with industry, location and other variables. Click on Chart or download results. The image below shows the number of businesses by sic code. You can sort by NAICS code, city, zip code, sales and employee size.

Crunchbase (available at Lippincott Library) allows you to search for companies by Diversity Spotlight. I searched for Black/African American led.

Statista is an aggregator of statistics from a variety of different sources. It is international in scope. A simple search for diversity pulls up over 216 reports from many different countries. One report, Wages and salaries in the U.S. includes a section on diversity, including the table below.

For consumer information turn to Mintel, a database of consumer surveys and new products on the market. It covers the U.S. and the U.K. I searched “black consumer.

For more information, Pew Research Center recently published a report on Black-owned businesses in the U.S.

This is just a sampling of library resources. Come to Lippincott and ask librarians to show you more resources.

Tis the Season to…Shop???

Lots of retailers want to know the answer to this question. Holiday shopping comprises a huge percentage of annual sales for retailers. Getting the correct strategy for this seasonal event is crucial. Luckily, Lippincott Library has many resources to help with strategizing, including consumer surveys, trend reports and more. What are consumers looking to buy, where are they likely to shop and what ads will tempt them to purchase merchandise.

Mintel Reports covers consumer trends and products. Focused on the U.S. and U.K., data comes from MRI-Simmons and Kantar Profiles, among other sources. Detailed methodology is provided at the end of reports. Try a keyword search for holiday.

Based on consumer survey data, Statista is another good source for finding information about consumer behavior during the holiday season. It is international in scope. One recent report is Holiday Season and New Year in the US 2023, a consumer Insights data table: “Lavishly decorating their houses and gardens with light strings, real and fake Christmas trees as well as reindeer, snowmen and Santa Claus figures is only one of the many popular Christmas traditions of consumers in the United States”.  Details about the methodology is clearly provided.

eMarketer focuses on ecommerce. Data comes from in-house as well as external providers. Content includes articles, audio, charts, forecasts and reports. A simple search for holiday pulls up a number of results including Holiday Shopping 2023: Brick-and-Mortar and Ecommerce will battle for Retail Channel Supremacy. Reports can be downloaded in several formats including pdf, excel and ppt.

WARC (World Advertising Research Center) includes case studies, ad spend, rankings, strategies and more on all things advertising. It is international in scope. A simple search for holiday pulled up a topic category: Seasonal and occasion marketing. Here’s an interesting article about reusing older ads. It isn’t necessary to reinvent the wheel every advertising cycle.

For more Lippincott Library resources, use these guides: Advertising and Marketing Industries as well as Consumer Behavior and Demographics.

Happy Holidays!!!

Bloomberg is Back on Campus!!!

As of July 1^st, Bloomberg is available on campus, as it was prior to Covid 19.  It is no longer available remotely. You can access Bloomberg at the physical terminals located in Lippincott Library or in Huntsman Hall.  

For those working away from campus, there are alternative resources available remotely, such as Refinitiv Workspace and S&P Capital IQ, which may provide similar information. 

Refinitiv Workspace, which covers financial market information, is a web-based application. While on the go, researchers can access the information they need, like stock and equity prices. For example, to find fixed income data, select Markets and then choose Fixed Income. You can then drill into areas like bonds, loans and credit default swaps. 

S&P Capital IQ also provides financial market information. Type in a company name to get started. Use the filters on the left to find information such as balance sheet data, investments, and relationships to suppliers and customers. You can also screen for companies by using the screening tool. Refinitiv has a similar function. 

For more information about any of these resources, please contact Lippincott Library for assistance. 

We look forward to seeing you in the Yablon Financial Resources Lab located in Lippincott Library.  

Diversity in the Workplace

Looking for materials on Diversity in the Workplace?  The Lippincott Library has you covered.

Using Franklin, the library catalog, it is easy to find books and other materials on this topic. 

Franklin Search

A simple search in the Catalog for diversity and organizational change returns hundreds of titles.  Use the filters on the left of the screen to limit your search. You can limit by location (Lippincott Library), Subject (organizational change) and Publication Date (latest 10 years)

Finally, bookmark the titles of interest and then email these titles to yourself.   

The Conference Board provides reports, case studies and webcasts. Click on Centers and select the Human Capital Center. Further refine your results by selecting Diversity, Equity and Inclusion.

Sage Business Cases provides case studies on a variety of topics including diversity. From the Discipline tab, select General Business and Management. From the Discipline tab on the left and open Human Resource Management and select Diversity, Equality and Inclusion. Next click on Apply Filters at the bottom left of the screen.

Use the filters on the left to limit results. Under Disciplines, unselect All and then expand Business & Management. Click on Human Resource Management. At the top of the screen sort by Most Recent to pull up more current cases.

For articles use ABI-Inform. Use a keyword search such as organizational behavior and workplace diversity. Like Franklin, there are filters on the left of the screen to help focus your search. In this case I limited to scholarly journals, subject terms and a date range. Keywords are highlighted in the results list to help with identifying relevant articles. You can select titles by using the check box nest to the title and save them to view later.

These databases are a few of the library resources to search for content on your topic. Contact me for further suggestions!

Adaptogens and Cannabis: Recipes for Stress Relief

Let’s face it: we are all stressed out. According the CDC Household Pulse Survey in 2019 In 2019, 8.1% of adults aged 18 and over had symptoms of anxiety disorder, 6.5% had symptoms of depressive disorder, and 10.8% had symptoms of anxiety disorder or depressive disorder. By April 2021, 32.1% of respondents reported symptoms of anxiety disorder or depressive disorder. We need to decompress.

Consumers are focused on health and wellness, including natural ingredients. In food, beverage, pain relief, and beauty products, adaptogens and CBD ingredients are becoming more popular and sought out by consumers. A simple search in PubMed for adaptogens and stress retrieved 317 articles discussing the efficacy of adaptogens in relieving stress.

Several Lippincott Library resources can help in exploring the opportunities for alternative or innovative ingredients.

GLOBAL FINANCIAL DATA

Recently, I was trying to help someone get US Gross Domestic Product (GDP) statistics back to 1915. The problem? GDP did not exist as a construct going that far back in time. However, there was a source that came to mind: Global Financial Data (GFD). This database specializes in providing long time series on stocks, bonds, and economic indicators. In the case of GDP for the United States, they have extended it back to 1789. You can use GFD anonymously or you can create a personal account in order to access certain features such as saving workbooks.

Directly from the landing page, you access search options, GFD Power Downloads, and Help.

It is easy to download data or to create graphs to demonstrate a point. Below is a sampling of what GFD has to offer.

Consumer Marketing and COVID-19: Lippincott Library Resources

Covid 19: CDC

COVID-19 has turned the world the world upside down and dramatically impacted the way we behave.  New conditions require new solutions. Some of Lippincott Library’s resources can help make sense of what this means for consumer behavior and marketing. Below is a sampling of some resources and the types of information available.

The COVID-19 guide from Penn’s Biomedical Library provides links to campus, city, state and national resources oriented to the crisis, as well as to areas of emerging research.

Lippincott Library Resources: Social Impact Investing

I came across some startling statistics recently.

The World Economic Forum’s most recent Global Gender Gap report claims that, at the current rate of progress, it will take about 108 years to reach gender parity. Here are some surprising related statistics.

Research from the FAO shows that the number of undernourished people in the world has risen since 2015.

These problems and more have prompted many investors to consider how their investments affect people and the global environment. Investors want to do good while doing well. It seems that impact investing is having an impact and may be worth pursuing. For example, the World Bank notes that the world attained the first Millennium Development Goal target – to cut the 1990 poverty rate in half by 2015 – five years ahead of schedule.

CBD and THC: green light for investment

Image by Roberto Valdivia

A recent article in Bloomberg News instantly grabbed my attention.  Joe Montana, quarterback extraordinaire and football icon, now a venture capitalist, just participated in a $75 million funding for a company that sells marijuana products in stores throughout California.  Taking a risk on a controversial investment, Joe is positioned to win in an industry which he hopes can make a “serious impact on opiod use or addiction”.  In fact, cannabis related products could help football players or others in high impact, injury prone professions. This industry includes growers and retailers as well as medical and recreational products.

Like Joe, investors seem sweet on cannabis derived products that provide health and wellness benefits. But where is this industry headed as a business investment? How great is the risk? What are the opportunities? the library has a number of resources that can help to answer these questions.

Bloomberg: 10 Tips for Students

Bloomberg has sent out a notice containing 10 Top Tips for Students.  Go to this link to learn more:  Top Picks for Students.