Resource of the week: Datamonitor 360

What is it?

Use Datamonitor 360 to find worldwide company, industry and country reports along with product intelligence, business strategy, news and opinion.
Search for a company, industry or country.

Why use it?

• Find out about companies worldwide 
• Prepare for a job interview or an assignment
• Quickly find the strengths and weaknesses for a company
• Identify key executives
• Find market research reports from a wide range of industries

A sample search on Datamonitor 360:

Resource of the week: Public Information Online

What is it?
Public Information Online brings together all UK Parliamentary, Scottish Parliamentary, Northern Ireland Assembly, National Assembly for Wales, Scottish Government publications and non-Parliamentary publications in pdf format. This includes documents such as House of Commons Papers, Bills and Explanatory Notes, House of Lords Papers, Bills and Explanatory Notes, Command Papers, Public Bills and Standing Committee Debates. Coverage varies, but tends to be from 2006/2007/2008 onwards. Hansard and the Civil Service Yearbook are also available from this site.

Non-Parliamentary publications are available from 2009 onwards and include documents from organisations such as the Audit Commission, Department for Work & Pensions, Health & Safety Executive, National Statistics and the Law Commission.

Search by Parliamentary Session, Paper number, Title or phrase/keyword/subject term with options to further sort and refine your results.


Why use it?

1. Keep up to date with Parliamentary issues.
2. Trace the history of a particular debate or issue.
3. Use the Bill Tracker to follow a particular bill through the legislative process, or sign up to an RSS feed/email alert to be kept informed of progress.
4. Use the House of Commons thesaurus to find subject terms related to your topic to help with further research.
5. Find evidence to see how issues have been dealt with across the different Parliaments/National Assemblies.

Screen showing the Pensions Bill and associated documents:

ticTOCs current awareness service is now live

ticTOCs, the JISC-funded project led by the University of Liverpool to create a one-stop shop for RSS table of contents feeds is now available at http://www.tictocs.ac.uk/.

See the full announcement at:

http://tictocsnews.wordpress.com/2008/12/11/scholarly-journals-new-free-service-makes-keeping-up-to-date-easy/

Note that it currently covers over 11,000 scholarly journals from more than 400 publishers. If you are about to go off on your Xmas break you might like to try setting up some feeds to keep yourself up to date while you are away…

Our own web page about RSS feeds for current awareness:

http://www.liv.ac.uk/library/techserv/ejrnl/rss.html

explains how to use ticTOCs to find the feeds you want and how to export those feeds to a ‘proper’ feed reader. (The idea is for people to include the feeds in some sort of personalised page that they look at every day – that could be Microsoft Outlook!)

For those who want to be alerted to articles-on-a-topic rather than complete tables of contents, our page above advises creating saved search alerts on a database (as an RSS feed rather than an email alert if you prefer).

You are of course welcome to revisit the ticTOCs site to view your chosen feeds but it has no built-in alerting mechanism (yet?) so we would encourage people to take their feeds elsewhere. Other feed readers may also have the facilities to group/merge feeds into folders, search within feeds, etc. Our priority on the project has been to build the most comprehensive database of feeds, not to reproduce feed-reader functionality that is already available in many other places.