Business information on CD‐ROM: the Datext service at Dartmouth College, New Hampshire

Abstract

The Feldberg (business studies) Library at Dartmouth College has, since January 1986, been subscribing to Datext, a CD‐ROM database containing bibliographic, textual, and numeric information on over 10,000 American public companies. The data is derived from six commercial online databases and held on four optical discs, new versions of which arrive monthly. The ‘ondisc’ database is searched using software supplied by Datext, Inc. and running on an IBM PC. Searching is menu‐based and designed with end‐users in mind. Datext menus, screen displays, and facilities for further processing of retrieved data (e.g. on spreadsheets) are described and illustrated. CD‐ROM ondisc searching is compared with traditional online searching, and the currency of information on Datext is discussed. It is concluded that while straightforward repackaging onto CD‐ROM of single online databases may not be attractive, ‘value‐added’ products such as Datext, which collate information from several sources and provide facilities for manipulation of the retrieved data, will be greatly valued in particular library situations.