As a follow up to last week's question from a student; another Music Business Management student has asked some further questions -Here are the questions and my replies, I hope that these are useful and of interest.
Q.I checked your blog and in one of your posts one of my classmates asked a similar question to what I had in mind. In your reply you listed all of the data sources I already use: Factiva, Business Source Complete, Datamonitor, and Mintel. I've also recently discovered Emerald. Are there any additional sources I am missing that may be helpful or are those the ones I should be using?
A.Many thanks for your enquiry and for looking at the blog. It really depends on what you are looking for, as different databases do different things - they each have their own strengths and focus of expertise. e.g. we usually use Emerald for management-related topics (although it does cover other business topics as well). I don’t know if you have looked at International Index to Music Periodicals (IIMP) ?– This index covers popular and specialist music journals – However it is only an index and doesn’t give us full text access, which means you will have to look for the physical journal on the library shelves.
Q.What about accessing other sources through other universities? Is that possible?
A. Like the University of Westminster, other Universities don’t allow access to their electronic resources – this is because of the licensing agreement that we all sign up to. However if you become a member of the British Library you will be able to access their electronic resources when you visit the British Library. Here’s a list of their
Music resources, and
Social Sciences/Business Resources.
Q.My other main question was about best practices when using these data sources. Do you have any tips on searching within these sources that will yield better and more precise results? I generally don't get into advanced searches which may be part of the problem.
A.When using these sources – to get more precision, then yes my tips would include using the advanced search and to think about the words you are using . There’s also a guide to some other techniques
here - I’m very happy to run a quick session with you on this if you have time? e.g. Factiva has lots of “tricks”, but when you know them it really helps with the searching.
Guides to some of the electronic resources we subscribe to are
here.
Q.Finally, another question that came to mind was what publications does the university subscribe to that I can access off campus? I know about Music Week, but is there somewhere on the library site that would give me a list of publications I can access. For example I like Wired magazine for following tech trends, is that accessible? I doubt it, but I hope you get what I mean. Thanks,
A.All publications that we subscribe to (whether in print or electronic) are listed from and accessible via library search.
You can also use the E-Journals A-Z (top right-hand corner) to check for electronic- only journal titles
Wired is available electronically.I notice that Wired has an
RSSfeeder – which may help you with keeping up with trends (I can help you with this as well if you’d like).
Hope these answers help; do book an appointment if you need more help or if this is confusing.
Eleri
