The following two publications were recently brought to my attention. These are particularly useful (and free) supplements from Advertising Age that contain advertising information that would be difficult to find elsewhere. For example, the Digial Marketing & Media Fact Pack contains consumer internet usage, blog user stats, search engine market share, mobile device user stats, and social networking demographics amongst other stats and info. The Search Marketing Fact Pack has info on topics such as "driving traffic to Wikipedia and YouTube" and search site statistics.

Digital Marketing & Media Fact Pack
http://www.adage.com/images/random/digitalfactpack2007.pdf

Search Marketing Fact Pack
http://adage.com/images/random/datacenter/2007/searchfactpack2007.pdf

Posted by Louise Feldmann at 11:41 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The UN Statistical division has recently launched a new database, UNdata, that searches across all their statistical databases, over 55 million records, making it obviously much easier to search for global statistics. The interface is fairly intuitive and results pages provide information as to what database the statistics are pulled from. The database is available at:
http://data.un.org/

Posted by Louise Feldmann at 12:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I've just discovered that the OECD is offering access to all their statistics while their new aggregate database, OECD.Stat is in beta. Their website indicates that this will be free for the first part of 2008. Statistics cover a range of topics including agriculture, demographics, finance, education, health, science, productivity, etc. Check it out at:

http://stats.oecd.org/wbos/Default.aspx

Posted by Louise Feldmann at 08:29 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The IMF's World Economic Outlook Database is a free resource that contains selected macroeconomic data series. Data is available from 1980 to the present and includes national accounts, inflation, unemployment rates, balance of payments, fiscal indicators, trade for countries and country groups (aggregates), and commodity prices. While this information is available elsewhere, this database is very easy to use and information is well organized. Tables are in tab deliminated format and easily downloadable to Excel.

http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/weo/2008/01/weodata/index.aspx

Posted by Louise Feldmann at 04:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Northern Light started in the mid-nineties as one of numerous search engines vying to organize the Internet in its early days. The website has gone through various forms, including a fee-based service, but will now be offering a free business search engine. The official launch is in mid-April, but is now available in beta. From what I've seen so far, this looks like an excellent resource for finding business-related content on the web.

Recent article from Information Today
http://newsbreaks.infotoday.com/nbReader.asp?ArticleId=41368

Northern Light search
http://www.nlsearch.com/home.php

Posted by Louise Feldmann at 10:03 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

This doesn't pertain to business or economics exactly, but is an exciting project. Europeana, is a digital library collection that brings together digital content from European museums, archives, libraries, and audio-visual collections. It's expected launch date is November 2008, but you can view a demo and provide feedback on its development. It looks like a very exciting project. Be sure to watch the "boots" video.

http://www.europeana.eu/

Enjoy the weekend!

Posted by Louise Feldmann at 10:19 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

You may or may not have heard that earlier this year the NIH adopted a revised public access policy requiring all peer-reviewed articles that report on NIH funded research to be deposited in PubMed within 12 months of publication. ARL (the Association of Research Libraries) in conjunction with SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition) have written a white paper that details how grantees can comply with the new policy. This is available at:
http://www.arl.org/sparc/advocacy/nih/copyright.html
This issue is of high interest within the library community. If you have any questions, please feel free to contact me.

Posted by Louise Feldmann at 03:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)