Our December 2009 issue of The Information Advisor will provide an indepth article on sources and strategies for locating international industry information. On rare occasions, we make one of our articles available to non-subscribers, and we are doing so here: it’s a 4 page PDF that identifies and describes databases from Dialog and standalone online services, international agencies like the UN, OECD, and the World Bank, search strategies and tips when you need to unearth information on industries around the globe.

You can link and download the copy free here

Enjoy!

The long awaited regulations from the SEC outlining which firms must file with XBRL tags (generally the largest 500 that follow GAAP) and when (end of 2nd quarter)  have just been published by the SEC. You can link to the full report in PDF here, but the relevant information begin on page 39.

The surprise is that the final decision here was to exempt firms from having to tag their narratives: eg the management discussions, executive compensation etc. From a researcher’s standpoint, that’s too bad, as this means less potential for precision searching. However the SEC says it may revisit this, and/or make this kind of tagging “optional”. We’re doing a full report on sources for searching both the EDGAR and XBRL tagged filings in the March and April issues of The Information Advisor.

In an interview today with the CEO of a well known business information product vendor, the CEO confirmed that his firm’s sales were down quite a bit: primarily as a result of the loss of the buying power of financial service firms such as Lehman and other Wall Street companies.

He also mused that the Thomson Corporation, which really relies on the financial services industry as clients for its products and services must be feeling this downturn acutely.

This all makes me wonder what the impact of the recession and the collapse of the Wall Street financial services industries have on the information industry as a whole?

Nicholas Carr, blogger, journalist, and author, most recently of The Big Switch, wrote this short but thought- provoking piece in this month’s issue of the Atlantic called Is Google Making us Stupid?: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains.

It’s a succinct and readable discussion not only of some of the possible downside of living so much of our lives on the Net, but also a nice mini lecture on some of the positive and negative impacts of technology on culture, going all the way back to Socrates’ classic concerns that writing would reduce all of our abilities to remember, and to devalue oral communications.

I’ve been thinking of a related issue for a little bit of time too–what does the Google mindset do to the serious researcher? Is it making us lazy, more passive, more willing to define research as tapping a few words into a search engine and accepting the top 10 results as our result?

Librarians and information professionals, academics, grad students (I hope) and truly savvy searchers know that good research is much more that this of course. But I know I’m as guilty as anyone out there when I turn to lean back in my desk chair and call up my home page Google to find an answer, source, or piece of information to a research question I’m pursuing.

The key to me it seems is to remember to be mindful that good research is (or at least begins) as an inner directed process. That is: taking the time to figure out what you really want to discover, why you want it, what you’re going to do with it, what is the most likely place to find it/who would know (including sources off the Net), and taking the steps and process you need to do the work to find the best sources, most efficiently. It’s not tapping words out into a search engine, or even worse, relying on an automated or “intelligent” solution that sends you articles, blog postings, news etc. that the system thinks or assumes you want, based on some algorithm, past search behaviour, etc.

Even in the age of the Net and Google, to truly perform research still means making an effort and taking an ACTIVE not passive approach to the process. It still means thinking.