New York SBDC Research Network

Here's the good news: there are annual data available from the American Community Survey . It now covers geographies of 65,000 or more, compared with the 250,000 population limit from last year. The ACS is designed to replace the 2010 Census long form questions. Here's the bad news: because of previous cuts in the Congressional funding, the 2005 ACS does not capture data from group quarters, which include prisons, college dormitories, and nursing homes. So, for instance, the population estimate for the city of Albany - calculated through a different methodology - is 93,523, down from 95,658 in the 2000 Decennial Census. But the 2005 ACS shows 78,404. One cannot make any population comparisons. Depending on the category, one may or may not be able to compare other characteristics either. For instance, 2005 ACS data in a place with dorms will skew older than what's really happening, whereas a place with a large nursing home will skew younger. Data on race, place of birth, vet

Not a day goes by here without fulfilling a request for a client who needs a list of this business or that. For years, the Research Network used a CD-ROM product called the American Business Disc (ABD) to make these lists possible. Last summer, InfoUSA announced that it was no longer making this CD-ROM available. The company (like every software provider in the information industry) is trying to steer former CD-ROM subscribers towards their web-based equivalent, called Reference USA. Many of you might be familiar with Ref USA. It is a common presence on databases offered for free to cardholders of local public libraries (as well as the New York State Library). If you're not familiar with it . . . you're about to be. Starting later this month, the Research Network will be creating business lists from this website. You shouldn't see much difference in the end product. Oddly, the web version of this product isn't nearly as versatile as the CD-ROM (a lot of useful sea

Angel Roman sent us a link to an interesting report with housing and community stats by community board, issued by the Furman Center: State of New York City's Housing and Neighborhoods 2005 . "Every year the Furman Center compiles statistics on housing, demographics and quality of life in New York City’s neighborhoods from a variety of sources. "This edition streamlines the presentation to focus attention on the critical data that reveals how the City, its five boroughs, and its 59 community districts, have fared in recent years. It shows how each of the City’s neighborhoods is progressing, both in absolute terms and in relation to other areas of the City. It provides the first independent analysis of the just-released results of the 2005 Housing and Vacancy Survey. Finally, it adds a chapter analyzing how the affordability and availability of housing has changed between 2002 and 2005."

Flecker, Cody. Collect Your Money: Fenix, Walter. Cleaning Services Bid Estimation: Hynes, William G. Start & Run a Craft Business Mcknight, Thomas Will it Fly? Louis, Louise 101 Home Based Businesses for Pet Lovers Taylor, Don Up Against the Wal-Marts Levine, Mark L. The Fine Print of Self-Publishing Richards, René V. Online Marketing Success Stories Baourakis, George. Marketing Trends for Organic Food in the 21st Century Mitchell, Susan American Generations Stanberry, Scott Federal Contracting Made Easy Pressman, David Patent it Yourself Chain Store Guide 2006 Directory of Apparel Specialty Stores

We’ve received a number of questions related to nonprofit organizations lately. The National Center for Charitable Statistics is another good resource for finding information about the US nonprofit sector as well as charitable giving statistics. The number of non-profit organizations in New York 1996-2004 is located here : the data can be broken down by type of nonprofit (i.e. public charities, private foundations) and includes information on asset levels and/or topical areas. More interested in household giving statistics? Try this “ Table Wizard ,” which will yield reports on giving by state, county or income level.

I attended a workshop last month sponsored by the Capital District Library Council, entitled "Copyright and Digitization for Libraries, Archives, and Museums" by Peter B. Hirtle, the Intellectual Property Officer at the Cornell University Library. Fascinating stuff, copyright in the digital age. One of things Mr. Hirtle always makes clear is something we librarians at the Research Network try to make clear when we address one of your copyright, patent, trademark or similar questions, which is what he calls IANAL - I Am Not A Lawyer. For many of the issues, the issues are not black and white, which leads to litigation. Librarians, as users of protected material, have a certain awareness of their obligations. One of the things I DID NOT KNOW is how digitization makes US, the librarians, the users. Whereas when someone goes to the library and uses the copier, or even uses the librarian as his or her agent, the patron is the user. So you'll be seeing some additional verbiage

Back on September 18th, I wrote a post that described the Research Network's plans on providing information digitally in response to client requests. Today, we took a big step in making this a reality. We'd been experimenting in attaching files (Word docs, Excel sheets, PDF files, HTM pages, etc.) for several months, but it was causing unforeseen problems. Our mail server & your mail server may not agree on certain things (like the size of a file being sent, or whether a message would fall prey to a junk mail filter, etc.). As a result, some messages weren’t being received. So, rather than trying to memorize the quirks of 20+ mail servers around the state, a different method was born. Gus Geidel (our harried but diligent MIS guy) created a section on the main SBDC website in which any of the RN librarians can "drop" a file. More often than not, the file will be several documents stitched together, and saved as a PDF file. The file name will comprise two parts: the

Given the huge popularity of Craig’s List and the spawning of so many other online communities, you may be interested to read this article from Fast Company that offers Craig Newmark’s view of “communities” and how to build them, their shortcomings and best practices. Are You on Craig's List? Craig Newmark has organized a community whose members include some of the Web's most influential people. Here is his manual for (virtual) community organizers. From: Issue nc02 November 2000 Page 26 By: Katharine Mieszkowski Photographs By: Sam Jones

Currently, we at the central office have a subscription to an online image database, and several of the photographs that appear on the SBDC website come from this resource. But, as I make revisions to the website (and I hope you’ll see some of them soon), I’m trying to put up fewer “canned” images and more pictures of our gorgeous clients. But what if you don’t want to pay for images and you don’t have a wealth of smiling faces to put on your website? Try these sources: U.S. Government Photos and Multimedia Most images on U.S. government websites are in the public domain, and can be freely reproduced and reused without permission. Browse available images from this site- just be careful to check each source’s policies to make sure you’re in the copyright clear before nabbing any images. Creative Commons Image Search For less governmental images, try the search engine at Creative Commons. Images indexed here still may be licensed in various ways (read more about Creative Commons licensi

The Department of Veterans Affairs has put together something called Performance Based Interviewing . PBI "is a method to increase the effectiveness of the interviewing process in selecting and promoting quality staff. With PBI, the interviewer carefully defines the skills needed for the job and structures the interview process to elicit behavioral examples of past performance." One interesting feature is a bank of interview questions designed by the job function. Following each level is a sample question. Level I: Frontline staff, those who do not supervise others. "Give a specific example of a time you had to deal with an upset co-worker, patient, or other customer. What was the person upset about and how did you handle? What was the outcome?" Level II: Work unit leaders, those who lead the work of a natural group of people, either temporarily (process improvement team leader) or as an ongoing role (foreman, section leader). "A part of this job is documenting

We've mentioned this before (in June 2005, to be precise), but it bears repeating: If your local media/legislator/campus office contacts you for some immediate data regarding the state of small business, then here are some sites you can visit to get that information: SBA's Office of Advocacy is the primary resource regarding studies of national & state small business trends. On their home page, note a menu on the left-hand side titled "Research & Statistics". A number of links appear beneath that heading, including "State Economic Profiles" (which provides small business data for New York & other states for the individual years 2002-2006, inclusive). Other choices on this menu include "Data on Small Business" and "Owner Demographics," both of which lead to pages that cite reports written by Advocacy over the last several years on a wide variety of topics (including women in business, the availability of financing to smal

The New York Times had put most of their opinion columns and online archives behind a subscription wall and called it Times Select. It suddenly cost fifty smackers to access their columnists. Not this week. http://select.nytimes.com/pages/timesselect/index.html November 6-12, 2006

Polls are open from 6 a.m. to 9 p.m. on Tuesday, November 7. For more information, contact your local Board of Elections and/or the League of Women Voters .

The StreetWise Small Business Book of Lists: Hundreds of Lists to Help You reduce Costs, Increase Revenues, and Boost Your Profits. The broad sections in this book are: Starting Up, High Finance, Where you Work, Day-to-Day, Your Taxes, The Geek Section, Your Customers & Prospects, and Your People. That sounds like the usual rundown but each of these sections covers lists like: Ways to Find Your Start-up’s Niche in the Market Things to do Before Writing Your Government Proposal Most Common Home-Based Business Zoning Issues Questions to Ask When Interviewing and Individual Accountant Best Ways to Reduce Inventories Popular Voice Mail Systems Popular CRM Vendors for Enterprises Tips for creating Your Direct Mail List Just another good source to add to our repetoire.

Perhaps it is just my “nesting" instinct, but this apartment-dweller wants a house. For the time being, I’ll just have to settle for researching housing trends. To that end, here are a couple of good sites: Money Magazine has prepared several Top 10 lists on the real estate market, including which markets are forecasted to have the fastest growth, slowest growth, and highest and lowest home prices. This page also offers articles and advice on real estate topics. For more information on housing in this country, check out Harvard University’s Joint Center for Housing Studies . They offer some very useful full-text reports, including ‘The State of the Nation’s Housing, 2006,” “America’s Rental Housing, 2006” and “The Changing Structure of the Home Remodeling Industry, 2005.”

From the ghouls at the Census BOO-REAU: The observance of Halloween, which dates back to Celtic rituals thousands of years ago, has long been associated with images of witches, ghosts, devils and hobgoblins. In the United States, the first official citywide Halloween celebration occurred in Anoka, Minn., in 1921. Over the years, Halloween customs and rituals have changed dramatically. Today, many of the young and “young-at-heart” take a more light-spirited approach. They don scary disguises or ones that may bring on smiles when they go door-to-door for treats or attend or host a Halloween party. "Trick or Treat!" 36.1 million: The estimated number of potential "trick-or-treaters" in 2005 — 5- to 13-year-olds — across the United States , which declined by 284,000 from 2004. Of course, many other children — older than 13, and younger than age 5 — also go trick-or-treating. 108 million: Number of occupied housing units across the nation — all potential stops for "

The web-based version of the SBDC book "What's Your Signage?" is now up & running. It went live late last Friday. It can be found at http://www.whatsyoursignage.com . The site is a very compressed version of our 2004 book, and has two purposes. The first is to give small business owners a brief overview on the value of effective signs. Studies have shown that effective signage has a positive impact on sales. The second purpose of the site is to match small business owners with a sign company near them. The site was developed with a lot of help from the International Sign Association, and they're also letting us use their member database. Signage doesn't seem to elicit much of a response. It's not always something that is considered when our clients come to us, looking to improve their marketing reach. However, as a cost-effective & hard-working advertising mechanism for a business, it ought to be. Our website would be just the tip of the iceber

With a bit of a year-end shopping spree, we have updated a number of areas in our collection with titles that we imagined would interest our clientele given the type of requests we get. We have tried to focus on practical titles, many that deal with specific industries. There are a few books that are generally geared to small business owners, on marketing and business principles that are still very interesting. 3G Marketing on the Internet Bricks & Mortar: renovating or Building a Business Incubation Facility Conducting Research Surveys Via Email & the Web Dan Poynter’s Self Publishing Manual Drive a Modest Car& 16 Other Keys to Small Business Success Guerilla Marketing for Free How to Create a High Profit Photography Business Legal Research: How to Find and Understand the Law Making Money in the Fitness Business Organic, Inc. Patent, Copyright & Trademark Spa Business Strategies Start Your Own hair Salon & Day Spa Starting a Medical Practice The 7 Irrefutable Rul

Created by David Sheddon, Library Director at the Poynter Institute (a journalism school), this bibliography presents resources for those working in new media. Useful to anyone involved with internet publishing, or those just curious about the information sharing power of the Web. Links include various histories of the internet, guides to blogging, and internet trends, stats and demographics. There are lists of relevant books too.

I learn so much from being on certain listservs. For instance, from the Business Librarians' list, I've learned that: M1 Money supply = currency, demand deposits, checkable deposits, and travelers checks M2 money supply = M1 + savings deposits, small time deposits, and money market mutual funds M2 is the more accepted total and is always much larger than M1. Information on this is released weekly here . Historical data can be found here . Information can also be found here and here , though I find the latter, because of the format, to be less useful. Small business folks probably won't be asking about these things, but you may have a relationship with economic development folks or others who may wish to know. Another tidbit I learned are the definitions of a building's floor space: Gross floor area - "The total area of all the floors of a building, including intermediately floored tiers, mezzanine, basements, etc., as measured from the exterior surfaces of the ou