Answer to Ref Question #1

Reference Question #1 Where can I find the address for the Pennsylvania company, Blue White Illustrated? How many people do they employ? What is an estimate of their annual sales?

Most of you immediately went to Hoovers…..which is a great place to quickly find the information online.

Blue White Illustrated
3006 Research Dr Ste B1
State College, PA 16801-2768
Phone: 814-234-1177

Annual Sales $0.3million
Total Employees: 4

If Hoovers had not been available, the information can also be found in print resources in the Bus Ref. area (note that some stats are different in the print resources):

Pennsylvania Manufacturers Register
BusRef HD9727.P4 P429

Harris Pennsylvania Industrial Directory
BusRef HC107.P4A282

In both cases, start with the alpha listing to find the specific address. Then go to the geographic section to find the additional information. If you thought to use the product section in the Harris Directory and looked under publishers, there are 51 subsets. Who would have guessed that Blue White Illustrated would be under “Publishers: Periodicals, No Printing”? :-) So go with what you know.

If you chose to use
Ward’s Business Directory of U.S. Private and Public Companies
BusRefHG4057 .A5601
….it would have been harder to find the information.
In the Alpha list, Blue-White (because of the hyphen) was listed after Bluewater not after Blue Whale. If you used vol 4, the geographic listing by zipcode (guessing that it might be 16801), the publisher listed the company name incorrectly as Illustrated Blue White.

Along the way, one staff member found some info that was personally rewarding. ..One of the side benefits of this activity!

Question 2 will be posted by tomorrow…..and answers due by July 8th.

Ref question for June 16-22, 2007

Format: Copy question and then list all resources consulted, what the answers are and where you found the answer. Please give your individually written response to Rick or to me by Friday, June 22nd.

Question: Where can I find the address for the Pennsylvania company, Blue White Illustrated? How many people do they employ? What is an estimate of their annual sales?

If online resources are unavailable, what print resource would you use?

Testing

Over the next week we can test the blog. You can play with fonts, etc a little; but let's focus on readability and useful ways to share. Confidential, or sensitive, information will not be posted to the blog. Each person will need to use their initials or first name at the end of a blog post or comment.

Reference desk blog

We have established a blog for the Business Library staff to share information. We will use the blog in place of the reference notebook. I will be giving each of you permission to post to the blog. When you log on at the reference desk each day, please check the blog for new information.