The Scrumpdillyious World of Online Databases, Part Three: Foundation Center Directory Online

Isaac Asimov fans, calm down - way down. This has nothing to do with that Foundation. Breathe. Breathe. Okay, we can go on.

The Rochester Public Library is a "Cooperating Collection" of the Foundation Center. What does that mean for you? It means that you, the aspiring do-gooder can find ways to get hooked up with grantmakers who share your do-goodingness and have set up grants to help fund all that good.

The online version of the Foundation Directory allows you to search for grantmakers by name, state, city, fields of interest, types of support, geographical focus, officers/trustees/donors or by type of grantmaker. Or any combination thereof. It's easier than it sounds.

In a nutshell, the Foundation Directory allows you to comb through the vast sea of grantmakers and find one (or more) that would suit your goal and get contact information to apply for those funds.

You can also do extensive searches within a particular company, for a particular grant, or search the entire text of IRS 990 forms for grantmaking organizations (if you don't happen to be washing your hair that night).

Now with something this wonderful, you would think you'd have to be here in the library to use it. No, my friend, this is another one you can use online from home in your bunny slippers with a hot cup of joe and the weather outside being frightful.

Stay tuned for Part 4.....

Fantastical World of Subscription Databases, Part Two: Books In Print

What do I want to read next? Library readers have been asking that since the days of scrolls in the Alexandrian library. And while the launch of "Scrolls in Print" never made the history books as a particularly great innovation, Books in Print (BIP) deserves a place in the Readers' Hall of Fame.

If addition to the obvious (letting you know which books are in print), BIP lets you browse fiction by subject, award, or author. You can even type in a year and get the best sellers for that year.

BIP can give you information about particular books such as whether they are available in audio format(s), listings of when a book has been mentioned in the media, author bios and more.

The special children's area allows you to search for books by favorite series', picture books, recurring characters in children's works, and children's award winners.

One of the funkiest features of BIP is the Fiction Connection's "Aquabrowser". For those folks who like to "think visual", the Aquabrower creates a map of topics once you pick a category such as genre, setting, character, location, and timeframe. The map looks a little like a cluster of cocktail toothpicks, each with a different keyword on it. If you click on a toothpick keyword, your map will re-form and gives you a different set of related keywords. Meanwhile, on the other side of your browser window, you get a list of books related to your topic and if you find one you like, you can hit the "find similar" button and get even more books that are similar to the one you already love.

Lastly, (okay not lastly, but we can't get into every detail in a short blog entry), you can set up a "My Favorites" account that will allow you to save lists of your favorite books, build customized searches, and get alerts when books that meet your criteria are released.

See you next time for another one of our Merely Marvelous databases......

The Magical World of Subscription Databases, Part One: Reference USA

Okay, this is the first part of a loooooooooooong series talking about our wonderful online resources. How wonderful are they? Let me count the ways. Or better yet, let's just get started with one....

Reference USA might not have the snappiest name in the known universe - you can hardly argue with that - but it is a really great resource.

What can you do with Ref USA (as the cool kids call it)? What can't you do with it? You want to look up residential addresses all over the country? Done. You've only got a phone number and you want to see what person or business it belongs to, you can look that up, too. You want to know how many employees a company has, what the executive names and titles are, the type of business they do, what their sales volume is, what year they were established, generate a list of businesses of a certain type in a certain region, you've got that and much, much more.

This is also a really great tool for people looking to start a new business in an area (scout out the competition, see if there is a dire need for your company in a particular area), marketers (target companies that would be interested in your particular type of widget), and job seekers (search locally or nationally to look for the particular types of companies - big, small, particular industries - that you're looking for).

While we don't have time to go into all the functions of Ref USA, suffice to say that you can make all kinds of company searches from the most general (i.e. every ball bearing manufacturer in the USA) to very narrow, pinpoint surgical searches (all ball bearing manufacturers in the metro area of Kalamazoo, Michigan with more than 100 employees, a sales volume of more than $500,000, established since 1988, that own more than 10 computers, and much more.

This is one of the databases that you can access both at the library and online from outside the library as long as you have library card in good standing (and you know who your are).

Tune in next time for The Fantastical World of Subscription Databases part 2: featuring...??? Well, you'll just have to tune in.