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Article Excerpt
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
Midday, Monday, Sept. 29, 2008. Standard & Poor's 500-stock index and the Dow Jones industrial average were in the midst of steep declines. Later that day, the U.S. House of Representatives would reject the $700 billion rescue proposal. The email, from my head of reference, read, "I know you're busy, but it occurred to me, if you have any time, that it might be good to put together some sort of resource guide for students re the current bailout/economic issue ..." Good idea. As an academic business librarian, I had a general idea of sources to check such as the following:
* Books
* CQ Researcher
* Congressional Research Service Reports
* News websites such as The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, BBC, and CNN
However, I first decided to post a message to the Business Librarians Listserv, BUSLIB-L (postings go to BUSLIB-L@LISTS.NAU.EDU, archives at http://lists.nau.edu/cgi-bin/wa?A0=BUSLIB-L). With more than 1,900 subscribers, this listserv along with its archive serves as an excellent source of information and advice on business search strategies and business information tools. On Tuesday, Sept. 30, I submitted my question: "Anyone have a pathfinder on the economic crisis and want to share?"
Books
With the message posted, I started to run through my list of potential resources, starting with our local book catalog--URSUS. Thinking of an appropriate subject heading escaped me. So I did what many do--a keyword search. Terms such as "subprime" led me to books such as Confessions of a Subprime Lender: An Insider's Tale of Greed, Fraud, and Ignorance by Richard Bitner (John Wiley & Sons, 2008). More importantly, the search gave me a key subject heading, "financial crises," in the subject tracings of relevant records. Armed with this heading, I compiled a list of titles I thought would be on topic and available in our library system, printing relevant records for later review.
CQ Researcher
Satisfied with my short list of books, I exited URSUS, returned to our library homepage, and went to the library's list of databases. Selecting CQ Researcher, I scanned the titles of recent reports displayed on the CQ Researcher homepage but, to my surprise, found nothing useful. A simple keyword search...
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