Company and Industry Research Just Got Easier: Hoover’s Academic and Mergent Intellect Now Available Online

As part of our ongoing conversion of reference sources from print to online, the Cheng Library has added an online subscription to Hoover’s Academic and Mergent Intellect. The Hoover’s Academic database contains detailed proprietary information about more than 40,000 public and non-public companies, 600 industries, and 225,000 key executives, with additional information about 90 million companies worldwide. Hoover's delivers in-depth industry analyses, information on a company's location, history, products and operations, auditors, rankings, summary financials, top competitors, top officers and more. The industrial research sector of the databases is organized into 65 browsable sectors (with numerous subcategories) and supports searching by NAICS and SIC codes, with options to filter results by several criteria.

You can use Hoover’s Academic to make lists of companies using a variety of filters including location, size, rankings, industry, financial information, people, and IPO data. View basic company information, biographical information on executives, and industry reports (based on industry codes). The industry reports are from First Research. You can also search by industry and then view information on competitors within the industry. Try searching for “cellular” in the industry search box as an example. This search will lead to information on several related industries such as wireless telecommunication services, wireless telecommunication equipment manufacturing, wireless telecommunication handset manufacturing, telecommunication services, and others.

The Mergent Intellect database provides worldwide business information, including details on over 85 million companies, over 40 million executives, information on direct and indirect subsidiaries of complete global family trees, and Dun & Bradstreet research reports. The database also contains access to company annual reports (with a three-year backfile), SEC documents (10-K and 10-Q), and end-of-day securities pricing.

Please contact Richard Kearney (973-720-2165) or Kathy Malanga (973-720-3189) if you have questions or would like more information about Hoover’s Academic or Mergent Intellect.

Trial Access to EdITLib (Digital Library for Education and Information Technology) Through April 8

Sponsored by the Association for the Advancement of Computing in Education, EDITLib offers a portal to aggregated, peer-reviewed research on the latest developments and applications in educational technologies and e-learning. Encompassing more than 25 years of published international journal articles, conference papers, e-books, and multimedia content from tens of thousands of leading authors, the EdITLib Digital Library connects research and learning within one platform. The Cheng Library is providing trial access to EDITLib through April 8. EDITLib includes access to the following journals:

• AACE Journal
• Canadian Journal of Learning and Technology / La revue canadienne de l’apprentissage et de la technologie
• Contemporary Issues in Technology and Teacher Education
• Information Technology in Childhood Education Annual
• International Journal of Education and Development using ICT
• International Journal of Educational Telecommunications
• International Journal on E-Learning
• Journal of Computers in Mathematics and Science Teaching
• Journal of e-Learning and Knowledge Society
• Journal of Educational Multimedia and Hypermedia
• Journal of Interactive Learning Research
• Journal of Technology and Teacher Education
• WebNet Journal: Internet Technologies, Applications & Issues

EDITLib also includes proceedings from the following major conferences:

• ascilite Conference
• Global Learn
• Global TIME
• International Conference on Mathematics / Science Education and Technology
• Society for Information Technology & Teacher Education International Conference
• WebNet World Conference on the WWW and Internet
• World Conference on E-Learning in Corporate, Government, Healthcare, and Higher Education
• World Conference on Educational Multimedia, Hypermedia and Telecommunications

The database also contains several full-text e-books on the subject of educational technologies and e-learning.

Please contact Richard Kearney (kearneyr at wpunj dot edu, or 973-720-2165) if you have questions or would like more information about EDITLib.

Trial Access to VAST Streaming Video Database Through February 15

The Cheng Library is offering trial access to the VAST: Academic Video Online database through February 15. VAST, published by Alexander Street Press, is a one-stop multidisciplinary resource for streaming video covering a wide variety of academic disciplines. Subjects covered in the database include: American and world history, anthropology, area and ethnic studies, art and architecture, business and economics, counseling and therapy, criminal justice, dance, education, health, humanities, LGBT studies, opera, philosophy, politics, psychology, religion, science, theatre, women's studies, and world languages and literature. Each video comes complete with keyword-searchable, synchronized transcripts. As the video plays, the transcript scrolls, and what's being spoken is highlighted. Users can easily make custom clips, name them, and annotate them for use in course assignments.

For more information about the content and features of VAST, please see this product description. For a quick orientation to using VAST, please see this seven-minute YouTube video produced by the publisher. Please contact Richard Kearney (kearneyr at wpunj dot edu, or 973-720-2165) if you have questions or would like more information about VAST.

New Pivot Database Helps Identify Grant Funding Sources and Potential Collaborators

Faculty seeking grant funding opportunities and potential collaborators in their areas of research expertise now have a new integrated tool to help with both tasks. The Pivot database, which replaces the former Community of Scholars Funding Opportunities database, provides access to funding opportunities worth an estimated $33 billion from a wide variety of sources in the U.S. and other countries.

But Pivot is more than a search tool for grants. It also features a database of some three million scholar profiles - including WPUNJ faculty - based on their publications, associated web content, and additional details contributed by individual researchers, matching these to current funding opportunities. This additional content means Pivot users can search for a funding opportunity and instantly view matching faculty from inside or outside their institution; or conversely, Pivot users can search for a scholar and view funding opportunities connected to that individual's area of subject expertise.

Pivot provides all WPUNJ faculty with access to a personal account that can be used to create complete personal profiles, set up automated searches for new grant opportunities keyed to their own discipline, and identify potential collaborators both inside and outside WPUNJ.

Pivot is funded by the WPUNJ Office of Sponsored Programs and is accessible from its web page as well as from the Cheng Library's databases directory. Support for faculty is available through interactive training webinars (live and recorded), a series of training videos available on YouTube, and a six-page Quick Start Guide (in PDF format) that can be downloaded from Pivot's web site. On-campus support is also available from the Office of Sponsored Programs (x 2852, grants@wpunj.edu) and the David and Lorraine Cheng Library (x 2116, refdesk@wpunj.edu).

Now Online: The International Directory of Company Histories

The Cheng Library is pleased to announce that, starting with the just-released Volume 139, we are now providing online access to the International Directory of Company Histories. The Directory offers accurate and detailed information on the development of the world's largest and most influential companies. Each three- to five-page entry is detailed with facts gathered from popular magazines, academic periodicals, books, annual reports and the archives of the companies themselves. Entries provide information on founders, expansions and losses, labor/management actions, NAICS codes, key dates, ticker symbol, principal subsidiaries, divisions, operating units, and competitors, along with relevant statistics, dates and the names of key players.

The Directory, which is hosted on the Gale Virtual Reference Library platform, can be browsed or searched by keyword. As new volumes are published, they will be added to the online platform for expanded coverage.

Please note that Volumes 1 through 138 remain available in paper format in the Cheng Library's Reference Collection (Call Number REF HD2721.I58).

Please contact Richard Kearney (kearneyr at wpunj dot edu, or 973-720-2165) if you have questions or would like more information about the International Directory of Company Histories online.

Extended Trial Access to Two Major Databases from the American Psychological Association

The Cheng Library is pleased to announce that EBSCO has made possible extended trial access to two major databases from the American Psychological Association. The trials are to run from October 2012 through the end of June 2013.

PsycCRITIQUES is a database of full-text book reviews featuring current scholarly and professional books in psychology. It also publishes reviews from a psychological perspective of popular films and trade books. PsycCRITIQUES includes approximately 40,000 reviews dating back to 1956 and is indexed with controlled vocabulary from the American Psychological Association's Thesaurus of Psychological Index Terms.

PsycEXTRA is a bibliographic and full-text companion to the scholarly PsycINFO database. The document types included in PsycEXTRA consist of technical, annual and government reports, conference papers, newsletters, magazines, newspapers, consumer brochures and more. This database complements PsycINFO and the other APA databases with extensive coverage of gray literature relating to psychology and the behavioral sciences; it contains around 200,000 records that are not indexed in any other APA database. Furthermore, content from the Archives of the History of American Psychology collection is expected to increase the number of records substantially. PsycEXTRA is indexed with controlled vocabulary from APA's Thesaurus of Psychological Index Terms.

If you have questions or would like more information about PsycCRITIQUES or PsycEXTRA, please contact Richard Kearney (kearneyr at wpunj dot edu, or 973-720-2165).

New Content and A New Look for eHRAF World Cultures

The electronic Human Relations Area Files (eHRAF) database of full-text ethnographic field research, eHRAF World Cultures, is one of the best sources for the comparative study of cultures, and it continues to get better with expanding coverage of human cultures and new content.

The database now includes over 4,000 documents - many of them book-length studies - in full-text, representing almost 500,000 pages and covering 191 different human cultures across the globe. The database supports cross-cultural searching and browsing by a multitude of topics, and because each paragraph is indexed it is easy to zoom in to relevant passages, even in documents that are several hundred pages in length.

eHRAF's support team has developed a number of useful aids to help you learn how to use the database for efficient and effective searching. These include:

• A series of video tutorials covering all aspects of searching and browsing the collection
• A 12-page "Quick User's Guide" (in PDF) containing screen shots and illustrated examples
• A "visual tutorial" (PowerPoint converted to PDF) to provide you with an orientation to the database
• Free training webinars that can be scheduled with eHRAF staff (but please schedule a training class with Cheng Library staff first!)

The database is also rolling out a new and improved search interface, now available in beta at eHRAF World Cultures Beta. This new search interface will be refined over the next year and will replace the current version of eHRAF World Cultures in the summer of 2013, so try it now and let us know what you think. We will pass along any suggestions or recommendations you have to eHRAF staff.

If you have questions or would like more information about eHRAF World Cultures, please contact Kurt Wagner (Library Liaison to the Anthropology Department) at wagnerk at wpunj dot edu, ext, 2285; or Richard Kearney (Electronic Resources Librarian) at kearneyr at wpunj dot edu, ext. 2165.