88 8.11 Contributors of Information and Database Searching
88 8.11 Contributors of Information and Database Searching
The five different contributors of information generate their own types of database resources that communications professionals can search.
Public-sector Institutions: Databases of licensing information, lawsuits, nursing home inspection reports – all of the kinds of public records documents that government agencies generate are housed in specific databases. (More information about public records will be found in Lesson 13.) To find appropriate databases that might contain information you need, you have to go to the agency that would have generated the information – but that requires thinking about the topic you are researching and determining the type of agency at different levels of government that might deal with that topic. From there, you need to go to the website for the agency and locate where and what kind of databases they maintain. Public-sector institutional documents are also searchable through databases produced by private-sector commercial firms such as Accurint or Westlaw.
Key resources for finding public-sector institutional databases:
- USA.gov: This resource provides a comprehensive database of information from federal, state, local and tribal agencies that generate public-sector information
- Government Databases by Subject : This compilation provides an interesting sampling of public-sector institutional databases
Private-sector Institutions: While most commercial databases are products of private-sector institutions (for example, Lexis-Nexis, Academic Search Premier, Factiva), here we are talking about the kinds of databases that private-sector institutions might make directly available to researchers. Searching within a private-sector institution’s website is a type of database containing the contents they want to share with the public. Corporations will also create databases to support their commercial enterprises. For example, General Mills’ product locator http://www.generalmills.com/ProductLocator.aspx is a database for consumers looking for local availability. Ford Motor Company has created a database to allow owners to see if their specific vehicle is subject to a recall – you search by your car’s VIN (vehicle identification number.) http://owner.ford.com/servlet/ContentServer?pagename=Owner/Page/RecallsPage The use of databases to compile large sets of private-sector institutional information is widespread and researchers need to be clever to find and use appropriate information.
Several alert or filter services that are especially useful for advertising and public relations professionals to monitor for-profit and non-profit institutions include Business Wire and PR Newswire. Both services allow you to customize your search preferences so that you automatically receive information (news releases, stock price information, analysts’ reports, alerts of news stories about those companies or organizations you are interested in) every time something important happen