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.
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