explodedlibrary.info

3 free business research resources I can’t do without

Yes, I work in a law library, but a lot of my research work is business research. Each of these items has been helpful for me on several occasions.

1. Thomson Reuters league tables

For some reason I can never find the free version easily on search engines. I wonder if they’re using robots.txt to turn them away… – so I’m linking to them here. In case the URL changes, here’s how you navigate to them from Thomson Reuters home page:

Business Units / Financial / then in the Resources section on the lower right hand side of the page.

Although there are commercial services which also monitor deals, most of the people I work with only care about these free ones. I wonder if it’s because they are free and accessible, that they have become the defacto benchmark.

2. Yahoo Finance for historical Australian share prices

For people who can’t afford a Bloomberg terminal or products like FinAnalysis, Yahoo Finance (or Yahoo7 Finance as it’s branded in Australia) is the next best thing. Even the Australian Stock Exchange, which only provides extremely limited historical share prices on its official website, unofficially recommends Yahoo Finance for historical research. The site isn’t perfect – its share prices certainly don't go back to the 1980s, but for a lot of the requests I get, its range is sufficient and it is very easy to use.

The biggest difficulty with using Yahoo Finance is to get my internal clients to accept it as a legitimate information source. If there’s no “official” source for this data, they’re all unofficial. Then it all comes down to how the brands of the different sources are perceived. Let me just say that Yahoo is not a brand that is highly regarded by Australian lawyers. But if they cross checked the Yahoo data with prices from back issues of the Australian Financial Review newspaper, and saw no difference, would that change their perception?

3. Karen Blakeman’s list of Official Company Registers

Researching privately held international companies is one of the more difficult things to do in business research, especially when you’re not at all familiar with how a country regulates companies. Karen Blakeman’s list provides a very useful starting point.

Because in the USA, private companies are registered by state governments, Karen also has links to the relevant state government agencies.

Do you know of any other good free business research resources? Hoarding information is unlibrarianly (if that's a word) and ultimately self-defeating, so please leave a comment with your business research tip or secret.

no longer maintaining US permanent residency

One of the posts which has generated a few questions for me is this one from 2005, where I mention returning to the US once a year in order to retain my US permanent residency.

Since I made that post, a couple of things have changed.

Most importantly, there’s updated information from the US Citizenship and Immigration Services about this. It’s not very long, so anybody with a real interest in this topic should read the “Maintaining Permanent Residence” section for themselves. I’ll just point out one thing:

You may be found to have abandoned your permanent resident status if you:
Move to another country intending to live there permanently [my emphasis]

When questions of intention arise in this context, it is not so simple that an immigration officer might ask you what you intend, you tell her/him that you don’t intend to live in the other country permanently, and they just accept your word. No, US Citizenship and Immigration Services determines this intention from your actions.

I have found a few online sources which provide some information about how this intention might be determined. See here, here and here.

The bottom line is that just as it is usually a lot of work and hassle and paperwork to initially obtain a green card, it is not a trivial thing to keep it while while living long term in another country.

This leads me to the other thing which has changed since 2005. Since learning more about the requirements for maintaining permanent residency, I decided that I couldn’t justify doing all these things to keep open the extremely slim possibility that I may one day return to live and work in the US on a long term basis. In my first year back, which was fairly difficult, it was nice to keep that option open. But things have changed, and I feel a lot more at home in Australia. I’ll definitely return to the US as a visitor. Who knows what the future holds, if I wish to work there again, I’d rather take my chances with one of the new E3 Visas for Australians.

Something I’ve learned, both from moving to the US as well as returning to Australia, is that changing countries is not easy - at least for me. In fact it becomes more difficult as you get older. Let’s say that one day I do return to the US for several years, well if that happened, I couldn’t ever see myself moving back to Australia - except for short visits. I don’t feel ready for that.

the halcyon days of blogging are over

Almost ten years ago I read librarian.net and the Shifted Librarian on the web. I had no idea there was such a word as "blog", I had no clue about RSS readers.

Three years after that, I could no longer ignore the word "blog", I decided to learn about it and discovered the amazing thing about it - that they weren’t very difficult to make.

Despite the title of this post, I have little use for nostalgia. I don't wish to relive those early years of blogging, but I would like to understand and communicate how it felt back then.

It was extremely liberating. Some of that was the technology, the blogging software combined with the rise of Google. For the first time, self-publishing was inexpensive, easy and viable as a way of reaching an audience. But it wasn't just the technology, there was the notion that the blog was your own platform, use it to express yourself and say whatever the hell you want to say. After all, most people didn’t even know about blogs.

Gradually things changed, more people started blogging and more people started paying attention to bloggers, and things got more serious. But those changes were flowing on from the growth of blogging and were to be expected.

What I’m more interested in is the disruptive change, the changes which I wouldn’t have imagined in 2002.

MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, FriendFeed and similar services. Although I have described blogging as "not difficult", publishing via these new services is extremely easy. Although blogging has become fairly mainstream now, the ease of use factor of Twitter particularly has helped it become way more mainstream.

The difference between an old fashioned blog and somebody's Twitter or Facebook or MySpace page is that a blog is published for the whole world to see, whereas it’s possible to control who can access the newer services. This may sound fairly obvious, but I think it's caused a difference in how people use these newer self-publication services.

The really interesting thing is that most of the time, a blog is external to its author. Even the most personal blog is still a creation of its author, and not an extension of the author - like someone’s Facebook page. There are exceptions, such as the fake Stephen Conroy on Twitter. My own twitter handle is explodedlibrary, which may have been a mistake because my tweets are often quite different from my blog postings, which is one reason why I keep them protected.

I wonder, if more and more people can express themselves via Twitter or Facebook, does that mean that over time less people will be interested in starting or continuing blogging?

Guessing the future is always hazardous, because the things which cause the biggest change can never be predicted.

But even if blogging does go into a gradual decline, in terms of its popularity or influence (it's possible that if the mainstream news media continues in its downward spiral, blog posts may gain even more influence), I'm not worried that all of a sudden blogging will become meaningless.

the reason for the path

 There used to be a time when Monday was my biggest blogging night. Well I did do some blogging tonight, over at Libraries Interact.

In that Monday Muse post, I was attempting to be a little more detached - because I was posing questions, rather than just stating my point of view.

Stating my point of view is what I do shamelessly here. For the record, personally I am inspired by the Darien Statements. As some one who doesn’t get to go to a lot of conferences and the like, reading it (as well as being aware of how it was made), was like the distilled essence of a good conference.

At the end of the day, they are just words, and yes, there are often chasms between the words stating our aspirations and how things really are. But still, we need these things, or all we’re left with is the day to day grind or short-term maneuverings. And besides, words are what I work with everyday, I must think they have value.

To use a hiking analogy, it’s a matter of reaching the right balance between paying attention to each step forward (not losing the track, not tripping over rocks or sinking into the mud) and paying attention to the beauty around - whether it be inspiring views of mountains or the wildflowers which are just off the edge of the track. Sometimes the track is very difficult and treacherous, and demands extra attention. But when we stop paying attention to the vista, the reason for the bushwalk disappears - and we may as well be on a treadmill in a gym.

I don’t want my career to be an extended stay at the gym when it could be a challenging bushwalk which takes me somewhere I want to go.

researching EMs

The EM (Explanatory Memorandum) is an extremely useful document in Australian legal research. Many people just assume that every parliament in the Australian federal system has always produced an EM for every Bill. Unfortunately this is not true.

Last week I was asked to find an EM for a 1980 South Australian Act. But they don’t exist, instead the end portion of the their Second Reading Speeches is a lot like an EM, with a clause by clause discussion of the Bill.

How did I know this information? From an extremely helpful publication from the Commonwealth Parliamentary library, ‘Was there an EM?’: Explanatory Memoranda and Explanatory Statements in the Commonwealth Parliament

I suggest that anyone who ever may need to find an EM should read the whole thing, there is very interesting and useful information about the history and purpose of the EM. There’s also information about the EM’s cousins, the Explanatory Statement (used for Commonwealth regulations) and the Comparative Memorandum.

But if you’re only interested in knowing if a particular state or territory produced EMs during a given year, go straight to Appendix 2, towards the end of the document. One of the best things about legal research is knowing for certain that something definitely does not exist – because then you don’t need to waste time trying to find it.

the four elements of the Law Library Request from Hell

Urgent / Rude / Arbitrary or Unnecessary / Banal

Urgent

Even the most easy and simple task can be stressful if it needs to be repeated 100 times in 5 minutes. When the task is more complicated and it needs to be done in an unrealistic time frame, bad things can happen. I can see three usual outcomes to the unrealistic deadline.

• The best outcome is when librarian receives some help – from other librarians or from paralegals or even from the lawyer, and is able to get the job done in the required time.
• If there is no help forthcoming, the only way to meet an impossible deadline is to cut corners – do research which looks complete, but isn’t. That would be the worst outcome, and shouldn’t even be contemplated.
• The only other alternative is that the deadline is not met – and the work is finished when it is finished.

Whatever happens, a stressful time is guaranteed for all.

Sometimes tight and urgent deadlines cannot be avoided. I know this. But sometimes they can. I heard of one incident when a paralegal had been charged with collecting a few dozen cases which needed to go to Court the next morning. He was given this task at 10 am and did not approach the library about this until 4 pm!

That incident made me wonder how often these urgent requests are only urgent because someone upriver stuffed things up. All I’m saying is that it’s never too early to come to the library for help with a big research job.

Rude

Rudeness is the easiest element to avoid and probably the most virulent when it’s triggered. Rudeness often accompanies urgency and arbitrariness.

By rudeness I mean deliberate rudeness, not unrefined manners. Things like snapping or shouting, or making demeaning remarks.

Rudeness causes problems in the short term and the long term.

In the short term, unless the librarian has the emotional resilience of a robot, rudeness can ratchet up the difficulty levels of all aspects of the request. An easy request within a tight deadline may be transformed into a difficult request with an impossible deadline.

The good thing about where I work is that this sort of rudeness is extremely rare. Because it doesn’t happen a lot, when it does happen, it really sticks out. Word of it gets around, and in the long run, it’s never a desirable reputation to have.

Arbitrary or Unnecessary

Arbitrariness is when work is done for no reason. The most common instance is when a librarian busts her or his gut completing a difficult research task within a urgent deadline, only to learn later that none of it was actually needed.

Another manifestation of arbitrariness is when a judge or barrister insists that cases must be photocopied and not downloaded from a database as a pdf - which looks identical to the printed version. This really happens.

Unnecessary work is slightly different, it’s when the librarian has do a lot of work that’s unnecessary, usually because of the requestor’s carelessness or indifference. One example would be a wild goose chase caused by sloppily cited cases.

Banal

Banality needs some explanation about why it’s one of the elements. It is to emphasize that the Request from Hell is not just any difficult request. I don’t mind requests which are difficult and really test my research skills. Even if a request is urgent and arbitrary, and even if the requester is rude, if it’s a challenging question, I’m likely to learn something from the experience.

For me, a nasty request can’t be a true Request from Hell unless it’s also banal (“Common in a boring way, to the point of being predictable; containing nothing new or fresh.” From the Wiktionary).

My definition of the Request from Hell is meant to be extreme, the absolute worst of the worst. All four of the elements must be satisfied. That hasn't happened to me in my current job.

Of course, such a scale is very subjective. I imagine there could be librarians who are accustomed to dealing with what I consider the Request from Hell fairly regularly. There may be others who might read some of the things I have described and think I’ve already experienced several Requests from Hell. That is one of the interesting things about law firm libraries, there is such diversity in how they operate. I would love to hear other librarian’s opinions and experiences about this.

Please don’t name names of law firms or other employers in your comments.

Equinox post, librarians and park rangers

I am aware that I am a walking contradiction. One the one hand, I have a passion for using and consuming online information. On the other hand, I am in love with the natural world. Is there any way of reconciling these things? I started writing this a few days ago, on the day of the autumnal equinox.

Following an incident I tweeted about on the previous weekend, one of my former co-workers and current FaceBook friends joked that I should be a Park Ranger.

I’m sure that I’m not the only person who has daydreamed about working as a ranger. One attraction would be the location: spending extended periods of time in very beautiful places, really getting to know them, experiencing how they change with the seasons. Even more rewarding would be helping to open people’s eyes (especially younger people) to a different way of looking at the natural world. I am aware that the job would have its downsides: rangers also have to do that which could be considered menial and tedious. But then so do librarians some times, and I can live with that, even if I don’t love it.

[Anecdote which prompted me to start thinking about the similarities of librarians and rangers]

... This ranger was able give me information about this place which helped me appreciate where I was and what I was seeing. She gave meaning and context to this place. She reminded me of a good librarian.

I think that the best moments for a librarian are not all that different from a ranger. It’s when we get to see one of our users eyes open to some of the truths of our information-based world. It could be having them see that the library provides access to some amazing stuff and it’s not too difficult to use. It could be a realization that librarians are usually damn good at what they do.

I could look at other parallels between librarians and rangers. Looking specifically at access and navigating our respective spaces, the ranger uses roads and signs and maps and guided walks/activities and good camping/hiking/birding advice. The librarian uses the internet/intranet and the library catalogue and signs and library training and good research advice.

When things go bad, the ranger helps rescue those are lost, applies first aid and enforces the rules which are necessary to preserve natural environment of the protected space. Librarians can untangle the research mess which can trip up people in the library, we can apply emergency treatment to citation lists and are obliged to work within the constraints of copyright law.

The big difference between rangers and librarians is that rangers are custodians of a part of the natural world, and librarians deal with an artificial world, the library.

Traditionally, librarians weren’t just custodians of the library, but we also built it – decided what things would or wouldn’t be in the collection. Now that’s changing. We don’t control our collections as much as we used to. Yes, we still decide what books or journals we need to get in print, but the print collection is only one part of what a library does. I spend most of my time working in our online collections. My library only has limited control of these – beyond the decision to subscribe to a database/package or not, and maybe some basic configuration options – we don’t control these, our vendors do. The online collection also influences the print collection. If we can access text online, be it looseleaf service, journal or law reporter, that will make it less likely that we’ll get it in print. Finally, the library has to deal with resources completely outside its control. Despite our best efforts, we know that people are going to go to Google or Wikipedia first for business research and Australian law graduates usually prefer Austlii over anything in our online collection.

My point is that library resources which librarians have little or no control over are becoming the more important ones. They are the ones which are growing. In that way, our artificial world is becoming more chaotic and organic, closer to the natural world which the ranger deals with.

It’s probably too late for me to change careers to be a park ranger, and to be honest, on most days I’m happy as a librarian in my day job. It’s nice for me to be able to visit the Blue Mountains national park on weekends and just enjoy the place, without any of the responsibilities incumbent on one of its custodians. I imagine that it would be something like that old stereotype of librarians, those people who get to spend their days in a very peaceful place, who are able to read for pleasure all day.

confessions of an information junkie

Really reading anything is such a rare luxury in my work. I make a distinction between reading and skimming text. I sometimes think of myself as an information junkie because I seem to spend most of my day rummaging through texts of all kinds to find the particular information which I need. There is no time to linger, or critically consider an argument. I get what I need, and then I need to move on to find my next hit.

I’ve observed a few things about this state of mind:

• There is no such thing as information overload. It’s just more stuff to deal with. I feel as if I have broken through a certain pain barrier and now feel things differently.
• My favourite thing to do on the computer is press Control F.
• I prefer online text because it is crunchable (analogous to what number crunchers do with numbers) and flexible.
• When I work with print text, and sometimes I must, there are definite rules and processes which must be followed to find information – using indices, charts and tables of contents. Those processes seem at odds with the type of thinking I use when doing my best research of online sources.

The interesting thing is that research is not always like this, and I’m not always like this. Sometimes I need to switch focus, from the macro to the micro. One moment I might be weeding out large numbers of irrelevant cases or articles which were retrieved by my narrow but imperfect search. In the next moment, I need to switch focus onto particular paragraph to see if it’s really saying anything useful about this abstruse legal principle.

I like working in this micro focus, but there doesn’t seem as much need for it on most days. That’s why I’m trying to see the good in the macro focus – being an information junkie.

library phobia

There are people out there how are afraid of libraries and librarians. Most of the time librarians do not see them, because they avoid us if they can. But yesterday I think I met one of them.

She was the personal assistant of one of the higher ups in the firm, and had been asked to find a few books for him. She was quite anxious and very grateful to be helped. She confessed that she had been at the Firm for two years, and hadn’t used the library once – and then braced herself for some disapproving word or look from me.

It struck me because this is somebody who works with some very demanding people on a daily basis, yet she seemed scared of the library. How does this happen?

I’ve worked with librarians who were brilliant researchers, but sometimes had an imperious manner. When I saw this, I hoped I would never act in such a way. It seemed so counter-productive to be intimidating our users like that. But another recent incident has helped me understand how this can happen.

Towards the end of yesterday's evening reference shift, I had a very different interaction. When it finished, I remember thinking, I like this sort of reference question. I like it when the person asking the question has a good grasp of legal research, and has made a really good attempt at finding the answer before coming to me. It means that I can assume that the basics have been covered, so I can focus on the more challenging research techniques, which usually causes my skills to improve. My research skills are not improved when I am going over research basics again and again.

Now I wonder if this is where the dark side starts, when we want our reference questions to be interesting and challenging, and we start putting less value at the less challenging ones. Librarians who do that enough might start sneering at the people who aren’t asking worthy questions.

Of course it’s ok for librarians to want interesting and challenging questions. I learned yesterday that dealing with marginalized library users is its own challenge. Turning these people around, so that they might not be so reluctant to use the library in the future is even more satisfying.

I won't be attending Information Online 2009

I won’t be attending Information Online 2009, even though it’s in Sydney and that’s where I work. I would have liked to, but it looks as if this going to be an extremely lean year, budget-wise. Information Online is quite an expensive conference too, so if work isn’t paying or contributing, then it’s out of my price range.

Looking at the bright side, maybe it’s just as well, because I wouldn’t know how to handle myself when Stephen Conroy opens the conference.

• Would I even give him polite applause?
• Would I turn my back on him?
• If he says something particularly outrageous, such as equating all opponents of his scheme for mandatory ISP filtering in Australia with advocates for child pornography, would I boo or heckle him?

It’s not for me to give advice about this to anyone who is attending Information Online. Unless this becomes an issue in the next election, this will probably be the first and only time that Stephen Conroy is in this situation - where he is in a room with a large number of members of the public and voters who oppose him on the mandatory ISP filtering issue.