Featured database

EIU Viewswire is a daily business intelligence resource from the Economist Intelligence Unit. Covering 203 countries it highlights important economic, political and market developments, provides analysis and forecasts future developments. It is updated daily with up to 200 new articles per day. Access EIU Viewswire via InfoLinX at www.westminster.ac.uk/infoLinX

You can do a general search or you can search for information and data by country. Selecting a country from the drop-down menu will take you directly to the chosen country’s homepage where you can access the latest information, analysis and forecasts for that country. You can open a full country report by clicking on the 1-click report logo on the country’s homepage.

There is also a new interactive feature called data tool which allows you to compare and download core economic data for 150 key countries. Open data tool and click on the help tab to view a tutorial to guide you through how to use it.

Topical pick: sweet like chocolate

Photo by Sifu Renka on Flickr.com used under the creative commons license

According to this report from the BBC life is looking sweet for chocolate-maker Thorntons as they have reported a rise in profits. The sale of Cadbury to Kraft foods has also left chocolate (melting) in the spotlight recently. If you are interested in this hot topic, there is plenty of research to be done:

~Find out about the UK chocolate market, including its size, share and forecast from the Mintel report 'Chocolate confectionery- UK- April 2008', which includes a new market re-forecast. 
~Get a company report for Thorntons PLC on the financial database Fame
~Find out how much UK households spend on confectionery from the latest Family Spending report from the National Statistics.
~Borrow the book "Cadbury’s purple reign : the story behind chocolate’s best-loved brand" by John Bradley from Marylebone library. 
~Explore Cadbury's advertising techniques by viewing memorable ads such as the creme egg ads via the ad archive database Creative Club
~Research how the Kraft-Cadbury tale out played out in newspapers and journals by searching the databases Business Source Complete and Factiva for articles. 

And that's just the start.....

Christmas sales!

It already seems like a lifetime since Christmas but how did retailers fare over the Christmas period? Mintel have just released a webinar presentation on just this topic, entitled 'False Dawn'. To find it log into Mintel via InfoLinX, select the 'what's hot' tab and click on 'Economy in Crisis'. This also links to related reports such as 'Christmas shopping habits -UK- January 2010'.

Harvard Business YouTube videos

Harvard Business Publishing have a YouTube channel which has a wide range of videos on various business and management related topics. See: http://www.youtube.com/user/HarvardBusiness
In this video the Chairman and CEO of Cisco systems discusses teamwork and collaboration.

Economists Online- free resource

Economists Online is an EU-funded research tool for economists. It gives access to 50,000 bibliographic references, many of which will link to full-text. The main search page can be accessed here:
http://www.economistsonline.org/home and a guide to the site can be accessed here: http://www.neeoproject.eu/NEEOBooklet.pdf

Featured database

Creative Club is the UK’s largest ad archive, hosting over 1.5 million multimedia advertisements. You can search across all ads by company or brand back to 1997. Updated daily, it covers all media and includes full spend data, media schedules and, through its Adsnaps facility, downloadable one page reports on a specific company.

You can access this database via Library Search. 

Mintel's 'Market Size' Blog

Mintel's blog contains interesting snippets of market research news. Recents posts have been on the subject of the iPad, 3D entertainment and pay TV. Find the blog here: http://gmn.mintel.com/blog/
Also follow Mintel on Twitter: http://twitter.com/mintelnews

Welcome to the Blog!

Welcome to the blog from the Business Librarians at the University of Westminster. We will be posting information about new resources and library news as well as general snippets of useful information for the business courses. You can subscribe to the blog to get information delivered straight to your inbox. Please feel free to leave comments and questions on the blog.