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Librarians were concerned that transfer students' information literacy skills lagged those of their peers because transfers did not receive the library instruction that other students got in first-year classes. The investigators conducted semi-structured interviews with transfer students to answer two research questions: (1) How do transfer students look for information? (2) From the students' perspectives, how can the library best assist them? These interviews revealed that transfer students were confident researchers, largely because of their experiences before moving to their new institution. Transfer students were most interested in learning more about the library services and resources at their new university.

National statistics indicate that academic libraries are experiencing declines in reference transactions, but the references services in some libraries continue to thrive. While many studies explore reasons that students do not seek assistance from librarians, there is limited research explaining why students do ask for help. The authors conducted a study to answer two questions: (1) How do undergraduate students look for information? (2) What prompted the students to seek out help from a librarian? To answer these questions, the authors conducted in-depth, semi-structured interviews with undergraduate students who had received reference assistance. An important theme that emerged from the interviews was students’ preferences to search independently without assistance. Despite this “do-it-yourself” mentality, students aware of library research consultation services still continue to seek out assistance for librarians when stressful and time-consuming research questions arise. The findings from this study will help librarians better market their research services and understand how students perceive the help-seeking process.

Traditionally, scholarly output has been measured by the impact factor -- which considers the prestige of journals based on how often their articles are cited, the number of times that a researcher's articles have been cited in other scholarly resources, and the h-index, a metric that's derived from an author's recent articles and the number of times these works have been cited. Altmetrics untether the evaluation of scholarly impact from metrics tied to citation counts in academic journals. Some researchers initially think of altmetrics as a resource that measures how many times scholarly works are mentioned in social media such as Facebook and Twitter, but this limited definition is a disservice to altmetrics. Altmetrics' reliance on the social web to evaluate scholarly publications allows researchers to receive much faster feedback on the impact of their academic work. Most researchers are more familiar with traditional bibliometrics than altmetrics.

I was concerned that since trade associations serve as advocates for their industries, they might have a tendency to provide higher industry sales than those cited by more independent organizations. However, the trade associations that I surveyed had figures consistent with those of commercial database counterparts.

Reviews the available information services and databases that can be used to search for statistical and other data associated with particular industries. The information sources/databases covered by the review include: Datamonitor; Economist Intelligence Unit Industry Forecasts (covering eight key industries in 60 countries); Standard and Poor's Industry Surveys; TableBase; Euromonitor; trade association Web sites; investment reports; and business press articles.

For researchers or investors looking for historical data on many stock indexes, including foreign exchanges, Yahoo! Finance [http://finance.yahoo. com/?u] is an excellent choice. A comprehensive collection of well-known U.S. stock indexes includes the DJIA, SP 500, and Wilshire 5000 [http://finance.yahoo.com/ml?u]. All of the historical price data from Yahoo! Finance data is available in spreadsheet format, easily downloadable to Excel.

Indexes to the stock market provide valuable information for business researchers and investors and generates a demand for full text databases providing convenient and current access to such information. Describes some of the most useful Web sites providing stock index information, including: Dow Jones Standard and Poor's; and the nasdaq Composite Index. Currently, many Web sites provide historical data for stock indexes free of charge but there are serious questions as to how long this situation will continue. (Quotes from original text)