A Business Researcher’s Interest (Brint) is a searchable knowledge map of contemporary business, management, and information technology issues. It provides access to hundreds of full‐text articles and papers, magazines and journals, case studies and tools, and thousands of other resources on some of the hottest issues of interest to business, technology and information professionals. Cutting‐edge topics include business process reengineering, knowledge management, organizational learning, complex systems and chaos, intranets, virtual corporations, outsourcing, electronic markets & electronic commerce. Also included are a research jumpstation for all areas of business research, international business issues, intellectual property issues, information policy issues, Web strategy and marketing issues, and key applications of information systems research.
The site is designed as a directory, with many of the links annotated to provide the researcher with some guidance. The main emphasis of the chosen links is on knowledge management issues, business information, and information technology. To give an idea of the breadth of coverage, under Information Policy there are seven pages of links. About 10 percent of these have annotations which range from one to five sentences. With 18 major subjects on the main page, there is an incredible amount of content present at this site. Another useful category to check is Journals and Magazines. There are currently 20 links to online editions of business journals.
The design of the Brint page is fairly clean with minimal graphics. Since most of the content is external, response time will depend on the external site; but the Brint site pages load very quickly. There is a search button under the directory, which provides a limited amount of utility. There is a fair amount of self service on the pages as well, mainly quotations from reviews of their site extolling its virtues. Fortunately the print is small and one can ignore these items easily.
Another rather useful feature is a pull‐down menu that allows access to the other topics without having to go back several screens. However, this menu covers all of the Brint.com material, some of which does not relate to the Business Researcher’s Interest. Nonetheless, navigation is mostly straightforward. Additionally, they provide a virtual community network where one can interact with other Brint users in a real‐time environment. There is even an events calendar.
They call the calendar a “truly global community of happenings from around the world.” The calendar and networking are free. One last goody is that in the Business & Technology section, there are numerous links to library pages on such topics as company research, finding financial information and the like. So all those librarians working hard at helping students are getting noticed.
In summary, this is a large site of links to an enormous amount of data covering the business world very well. The site is well constructed and loads very quickly due to minimal graphics. Since most links are external to the site, response time on followed links will vary. I did find some older links to some data, but did not find any dead links, which is impressive considering the number of links in this site. I would encourage serious business researchers and those interested in business to bookmark this page and visit frequently.
