Content is king, consumers are king – given these two axioms, it is no surprise to see cutting‐edge publishers developing content aggregation aggressively. The chimera that the internet offers unlimited free and reliable information is now exploded, and more and more pay‐for information is asserting itself. Surrounded as it is with canny financial and legal privileges and penalties, this is increasingly a field where library and information professionals have to know what they are doing and where the good stuff really is. Ultimately this depends on two things – must‐have content and reliable delivery – and, as with film studios, publishers that have built up large repositories of copyrightable and billable material are strategically placed for global position.
BUSINESSnetBASE is a recent addition to an established stable of databases from Informa. This needs unpacking. Informa plc is a London‐based company made up of three arms – academic and scientific (this includes Taylor & Francis, Informa Life Sciences, and Informa Healthcare), commercial (this includes Afra Informa, Informa Maritime & Transport, Informa Telecoms & Media, and Euroforum), and professional (this includes financial information companies, insurance and finance and law companies, and agencies engaged with performance). Taylor & Francis itself is a global publishing business, with a flotation on the London Stock Exchange in 1998, and made up of several well‐known imprints like Routledge, Cavendish, Fitzroy Dearborn, and CRC Press. CRC Press (www.crppress.com) publishes professional reference books and works in the science and engineering field, and is an Informa imprint. Auerbach Publications is another of their imprints (www.auerbach‐publications.com).
So when we say that BUSINESSnetBASE joins an existing body of electronic information, more precisely we are saying that the CRC Press already has its CRCnetBASE, made up of CHEMnetBASE and ENVIROnetBASE and MATHnetBASE – in fact 16 of them, including IT KnowledgeBase and InfoSECURITYnetBASE, likely to most interest professionals in the IT and ICT area. The format of the CRC databases has been followed with BUSINESSnetBASE. A body of material, originally in print form (and co‐existing still in print form), deriving from the cluster of Informa imprints, has been made available online, within a clearly‐defined field. Users can browse titles by subject or discipline (e.g. chemical engineering, nutrition, ergonomics and human factors, statistics) and by category (for instance, in the InfoSECURITYnetBASE, you can browse by categories like intelligent systems, operations management, and software engineering).
You can do this in the same way on BUSINESSnetBASE – browse by categories like business information systems, finance and investing, human resources and training, project management, sales and marketing, and supply chain management. There are many categories – from Accountability and Effectiveness Evaluation in Non‐Profit Organizations and Gender and Entrepreneurship to Management Gurus and Small Firms and Network Economies. Likely to be of particular interest to information professionals are categories like Global Librarianship, Information Technology, Organizations and People, Intellectual Property and Innovation Management, and Software Outsourcing. Drilling down within categories, like Human Resources and Training yields material on coaching and leadership, workplace research, human capital optimization, and performance improvement; and within Supply Chain Management, topics like order‐fulfilment, projects and using models.
As Frank Baum asked in The Wizard of Oz, but what exactly is at the end of the yellow brick road? BUSINESSnetBASE is made up of over 170 business and related published works (published variously by Routledge, CRC, Auerbach and so forth). To buy them hard‐copy, the website says, would cost you over $21,000, assuming you do not already have (some of) them. Typical of the works that have gone into this project are: David Jacobs and Joel Yudken's The Internet, Organizational Change, and Labor (first published by Routledge in 2003); David Greisler and Ronald Stupak's Handbook of Technology Management in Public Administration (CRC Press, 2007); Marc Berg's Health Information Management (Routledge, 2004); Jessica Keyes's Knowledge Management, Business Intelligence, and Content Management (Auerbach Publications, 2006); and Bavani Thuraisingham's Web Data Mining and Applications in Business Intelligence and Counter‐Terrorism (CRC Press, 2003). I have deliberately selected out works likely to interest information practitioners, but there are many more on wider business topics like telecoms, company performance, research into work, and employment relations in the tourist industry.
The next question to ask is what exactly is the content aggregated and accessible here? It consists of some 170 previously (or contemporaneously) published books from the Informa imprints but – caveat emptor! – these are not electronic versions of full‐printed texts. What you get is both helpful and rather frustrating – abstracts or blurbs, title pages and prelims, contents pages and introductory prefatory material. Take three brief examples: for Peter Curwen and Jason Whalley's Telecommunications Strategy (Routledge, 2004), an excellent book in its field, the contents list is revealing and the preface discloses their approach and remit; for Iain Munro's Information Warfare in Business (Routledge, 2005), another fascinating book, just title‐page and contents list and a blurb (along with two pages of information about the publisher's series); and for William Yarberry's Computer Telephony Integration (Auerbach Publications, 2003), contents list and author bio and other conventional prelims with a short extra summary. Yarberry, also, is the second edition of the book: in answer to my query, the publisher stated that “new editions are added automatically”.
It is possible to come away from this with a sense that this is a shop‐window of tantalizingly good material, migrated online, but more with a view of advertising and selling the content that providing full access to it (in the conventional sense of, say, a full‐text‐searchable database). That said search strategies are fast and effective. I carried out numerous searches during my review‐trial access period – by author name (the telecoms author DiMarsico appeared unsurprisingly in the several works on telecoms, but did pin things down by chapter and gave specific chapter titles and memory), and then by subject (this can be done by stemming and natural language, and can display best matches and sort and limit results). For concepts/search‐terms already embedded in actual book and chapter titles, like “financial models”, retrieval is swift and precise. Even for more nebulous (and therefore more challenging) terms like “change”, there was swift retrieval across the content. Greater Boolean subtlety, like “internet + change”, “global or China not accounting”, yielded greater precision.
For anyone with the books or having decided to get the books for a course, these are most helpful (though unsurprising) functions. The devil's advocate in me is impelled to ask what is available here that is not already available from the existing Taylor & Francis, Routledge, and other catalogues. These – by a pleasant irony – are very efficient at identifying not just book titles, authors, publication dates and ISBNs and the like, as you would expect, but they also allow for subject searches (by subject or discipline, like bioscience or development studies or food science of information science), and of course catalogues on these are available by post and online. Typically, going into the downloadable PDF file of Information Systems and e‐Business: New Books and key Backlist for Routledge, you can already get a lot of rather similar information from them (I mean similar to what can be found in BUSINESSnetBASE). Taking Managing Technology and Innovation, by Verburg and others (published in September 2005), a likely contender for the database but not there (nor necessarily should it be – this is merely an example), the blurb is succinct and informed, and contents part‐by‐part are displayed fully and clearly, alongside essential bibliographical information.
Anyone considering BUSINESSnetBASE and its ilk, then, will find that their ultimate decision may well hinge on whether it has what they want. It is very important to know what it offers and using the free trial offer really makes sense to see it if fits well with your current operation and services. Taylor & Francis have made it clear in their advertising material that such a free trial offer is on the table. At the same time, what does come out loud and clear is that the actual content there is really excellent, and that any serious library covering business monographs, above all those from these imprints published over the last seven or so years (for that is the chronological range of the items there), should have them and would want to do so. Plenty of support information (how it works, new books, how to order, technical support and the like) is provided on the website. I asked about worldwide access, concerned about international copyright and distribution rights, and the publisher stated that “access is allowed from any location as long as it is within the intellectual property ranges provided”. That may be a matter worth checking if you believe that the rationale of rights zones might work against your acquiring any item.
Reviewing this business service has been an interesting experience, and it clearly is a product where likely purchasers need to be very clear what they want, what they are being offered, and whether it is worth paying the price. As with many related online products, say from Routledge, often reviewed in Reference Reviews, the content is usually impressive and often must‐have and that will probably, and ultimately, carry the day. There is just an insidious thought too, above all for information specialists who like analytical information – some diligent librarian, or indeed lecturer, may already have long lists of recommended readings, breaking things down as fully or more so than what we find here, and so a chat with faculty/academics in your institution may well be a very good idea before committing yourself.
