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Sharing the wealth: Lippincott Library's machine-readable files

By Michael Halperin

Librarians often speak of "rich" collections (comprehensive collections on a particular subject). Although this description is applied to collections of printed or manuscript material, it is equally suitable for collections of information in electronic form. For ex- ample, Wharton's Lippincott Library has the richest collection of machine-readable information of any academic business library. The Lippincott collection is available on the electronic equivalent of open shelves. Almost all of its databases can be searched directly by Penn students, staff, and faculty. The electronic files are available in two forms: CD-ROMs (which store about 250,000 pages of information on one five-inch disk) and time-sharing systems (which give access to thousands of databases world-wide). Here is an overview of Lippincott's electronic wealth.

By the numbers

Datastream: International economic and financial data with graphing and data manipulation capabilities. (Time-sharing)

Business Indicators: Statistical data for U.S. economic and business conditions. (CD-ROM)

Compact D/SEC: Financial information on all 12,000 U.S. companies filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. (CD-ROM)

Reuters FinanceLink: International time series data on stocks, bonds, commodities, currency exchange rates. Downloads directly to a spreadsheet. (Time-sharing)

U.S. Government Publications: The Federal Government is issuing many of its statistical series on CD-ROM. Examples of data Lippincott now has include the U.S. Economic Censuses, County Business Patterns, and Import/Export Statistics. (CD-ROM)

Wharton Data: Wharton's Academic Technology Services (ATS) maintains several important numeric databases on the School's VAXcluster. One way to get access to these files is through terminals in the Lippincott Library. The files include Citibase (economic time series), COMPUSTAT (historical financial data on 7,000 U.S. companies), and CRSP (daily and monthly U.S. stock prices and returns). (Time-sharing)

Full text: Instant gratification

Machine-readable full text is a library's fast food. The searcher types a word or a phrase and retrieves the complete text of journal articles, newspaper stories, and corporate reports. Listed below are some commercial time-sharing systems available at Lippincott and a few of their many full-text files. Dialog: Financial Times of London, Philadelphia Inquirer, investment bank reports

Dow Jones: Wall Street Journal, Barrons, business journals Lexis/Nexis: New York Times, SEC filings, accounting literature M.A.I.D.: Market research reports

A shortcoming of online full-text files is their lack of images (pictures and graphs). Lippincott has two full-text image databases on CD-ROM that overcome these limitations:

Business Periodicals Ondisc: The complete text in image format of more than 380 periodicals from 1987 to date. Laser Disclosure: Financial reports for all New York, American, and NASDAQ exchange companies.

And much more

Predicasts: Information on business activity world- wide. (CD-ROM)

EconLit: Citations with selected abstracts of the world's economic literature from 1969. (CD-ROM)

ABI/Inform: Abstracts of articles from 800 business publications, 1986 to date (updated monthly). ABI/Inform is one of the databases on PennData, the Library System's collection of literature abstract databases. ABI/Inform can be searched either in the Library or from remote locations.

For more information about business databases, call the Lippincott Reference Desk, 898-5924/5925.