American Business Information



ACCESSING ONLINE DATABASES FROM YOUR

HOME OR OFFICE

REFERENCE USA

Reference USA is an extremely powerful database. It has two components, one business and the other residential. The business database covers 14 million US businesses. The information given includes name, address, contact, phone, fax, toll free number, number of employees, sales, latitude/longitude, credit rating, public/private, stock abbreviation, and website address as well as SIC and NAICS (type of business) codes, officers and their titles and gender and biographies. It will tell you the number of personal computers, whether is it home based, year established, yellow page ad spending, square footage, hours of operation, credit cards accepted, competitors locally, nearby businesses, business expenditures and UCC filings. It also gives a map if you need to locate the business on a map. It also includes public filings and magazines and newspaper articles for the larger companies. They have also added the capability of getting annual reports and 10k’s and press releases if it is a publicly traded company. The residential database covers 135 million households and includes name, address, phone (if not unlisted), median household income, median home value, latitude/longitude and percentage of owner occupied housing. Both databases offer the capability of identifying surrounding businesses or homes by tenths of a mile up to a mile away and by miles up to 20 miles away. This information can be used to create mailing lists of the surrounding neighborhoods.

Pikes Peak Library District patrons have remote access to this database if they have a library card from us that starts with the number 4. The 4 indicates that you are a resident or property owner of El Paso County (excluding residents of Manitou Springs and Security-Widefield.) If you have a card that starts with a 7, you are participating in the Colorado Library Card (CLC) program, which involves a network of libraries throughout the state. State residents may obtain library cards at any participating library. A PPLD 7 series card will be issued with full borrowing privileges; however, access to licensed databases is only available to taxpaying cardholders or at PPLD facilities.

To find Reference USA Information

1. Go to the library’s homepage at .

2. Choose Electronic Reference

3. Type in your library card number for the password and your pin number

4. Choose Business

5. Choose Reference USA

6. Choose Business or Residential Database.

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The screen has you select your database to search. Click on the drop down box that says

“Select a database to search” and choose U.S. Business or U.S. Residential.

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The business database contains information on United States businesses and international businesses, if they have a physical US presence, not just a PO Box address. You can do two basic types of searches in this database, a quick search or a custom search.

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A quick search allows you to type in the name of a specific business that you need information on. You can type the name and hit search now or you can also add city or state if this information is known. Your search will produce a list of the businesses that fit the criteria you selected. For example, Hewlett Packard and California produces:

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If you then select the record for Hewlett Packard for the parent company by choosing the name of the company with the arrow pointing up and then by clicking on the name in blue you will get the complete record for that company that will look like this:

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Do not use the search terms “company”, “corporation” or “limited” or any of the accepted abbreviations, unless you have looked it up before. The database looks for exact hits and will not find the company if there is a difference in the abbreviation or way it is spelled. If you have a long company name try and search it using the first two or three words, if you get no hits shorten it to two words more unique (i.e. not Colorado Springs) only. The field is a specified length and it will cut off a word in the middle of it and if you don’t have it exactly it will not display.

To do a custom search, click on the custom search icon. You can then do searches on specific criteria or you can do combination searches on multiple criteria at the same time.

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The fields for a custom search include Company Name, Executive, Business Type, Geography, Phone, Business Size, Ownership, Financial Data and Special Selects. The Name category includes company name, and brands and products. Executives includes Executive name, title or gender. The Business Type includes keyword/SIC/NAICS or major industry group. The Geography allows you to search by street address, zip code, state, radius, MSA (metropolitan statistical area), city, and county or neighborhood. In this category you can combine address or neighborhood with anything else otherwise if you choose two, for example – city and state you will retrieve the results for the state alphabetized by company name because it defaults to the largest geographic field. The Phone searches by business phone, 800 numbers, area code or fax.. Business Size allows you to choose the size of business by number of employees or amount of sales; both of these figures are given in ranges. Ownership allows you to search by Public companies/private, foreign parent, home based business and headquarters/branch. Financial Data searches stock exchange ,ticker symbol, credit rating or business expenditures. Special Selects allows you to search by government offices, year established, number of personal computers, years in database, yellow page ad size, web address, Fortune 1000 companies or square footage.

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For example, if you wanted all of the companies in the Colorado Springs area that or sell or manufacture computers, have more than 10 employees and make at least 10 million, you would choose business type. You would then click on the word lookup next to “computer” which you type in the box shown and choose computers and computer equipment whol/mfrs and computer equipment and dealers and then choose Colorado and then Colorado Springs under Geography. (When there are two boxes on the screen you must put something into the right hand box by clicking on the choices in the left hand box to complete your choices. If the right hand box is empty you get zero hits.) To choose more than one entry under number of employees or sales, hold the control key down as you click on the entry you want. Currently, this will produce a list of six hits.

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You can select up to 50 entries to print as one search in-house. (From your home or office this database only allows you to print 25 entries as one search and then you must input a password provided to you every five entries to print.) To do this, click on the box next to the record you want and then hit the blue print button at the top of the page. You will be asked if you want summary (which is name, address and phone) or detailed (which will give you the complete record with a blue line separating them on screen.)

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To send it to a printer and not the screen, you must click on the blue print button at the top of the screen. If your search gave you more than 50 hits, you will need to mark records for printing and then unmark them to be able to choose additional records. The limit of 50 has been established by ReferenceUSA to discourage users from breaking copyright. If you do it from your home or office you will be given a password to input for every group of five that you print. If you wish to download you will be asked what format and where to save to. Choose Comma delimited or Excel to download unless you know how to use the other choices or it will not be readable on your system. Save to your computer (at home or office) or to a 3.5 floppy drive (A) or flash drive (E or F) as anything saved to the computer at PPLD (C) is erased when you log off and is not retrievable later. This will be saved as a CVS file and you can then open it in Microsoft Word or Excel for editing.

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If you need assistance using this database from your home or office, call 389-8968 during library hours. The biggest problem home users have is getting asked for user name and password twice. If this happens your firewall is blocking Reference USA and you will need to disable it to get in and then turn it back on. Once you are in the database you should be recognized by your computer for future searches and let in again without having to disable the firewall.

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ALL-IN–ONE SEARCH

The All-In-One Search database is a series of individual magazine and newspaper indexes that you can search to find articles that are either full text or citation only.

You may choose to click on any or all of the indexes that come up when you choose this database. It allows you to simultaneously search multiple databases thereby saving time and typing, as you don’t have to repeat your search strategy by entering the databases individually. These databases are Business Source Premiere which covers business and trade magazines, Health Source - Consumer Edition which covers medical and health magazines, MasterFILE Premiere which covers general magazines, Newspaper Source which covers newspapers including 30 national and international newspapers, and Regional Business News which covers business journals, newspapers and newswires.

Pikes Peak Library District patrons have remote access to this database, if they have a library card from us that starts with the number 4. The 4 indicates that you are a resident or property owner of El Paso County (excluding residents of Manitou Springs and Security-Widefield.) If you have a card that starts with a 7, you are participating in the Colorado Library Card (CLC) program, which involves a network of libraries throughout the state. State residents may obtain library cards at any participating library. A PPLD 7 series card will be issued with full borrowing privileges; however, access to licensed databases is only available to taxpaying cardholders or at PPLD facilities.

To find the All-In-One Search database:

1. Go to the library’s homepage at

2. Choose Electronic Reference

3. Type in your library card number as the password and your pin number.

4. Choose business

5. Choose All-In-One Search. To select the individual databases that you want to search, click the box next to the title and click enter.

There are two main searches in this database: keyword search and advanced search. The keyword search is a basic search for a one word or phrase. Type in the information you want and it will retrieve everything that it finds. You can denote a specific magazine or newspaper that you want to search or a date of publication if you want. You can also specify full text, though this may exclude articles because some publications, like the Wall Street Journal are not full text. Your search word(s) will be highlighted when you bring up the articles retrieved.

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You can also do an advanced search which allows you to do Boolean searching using the and, or, and not capabilities of the system. You can then identify the fields you want to search such as author, keyword, subject, or journal. This will pick up search terms when they appear in the same article, but not next to each other.

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One attribute that the database has allows you to translate the full text article to another language if your first language is not English. Currently you can choose from nine languages. The citation remains in English but the text of the article is translated to the language chosen b you. This is a free service and can be used by you in many different ways to benefit your business.

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If you need assistance using this database from your home or office call 389-8968 during library hours.

BUSINESS AND COMPANY PROFILE ASAP

The Business and Company Profile ASAP database gives company profiles as well as covering magazine and newspaper articles about the company or industry. It covers magazines and newspapers from around the world. Most of the coverage is from trade magazines and the content is more technical in language.

The best way to search this database is by using the keyword search if you want industry information and advanced search if you want a company profile with attached articles about the company. The default search is the “in entire article content” to make sure that you pull up all relevant articles.

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A keyword search on computer and manufacturers will yield the following screen.

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Many of the articles are available in full-text and they will also tell you how many words are in the article. This makes it easy to see which articles are going to be in depth enough for the kind of research you are doing.

Another type of search is the advanced search. This is the best format to use when you want a company profile and the articles about that company. Click on “advanced search” and scroll down the screen that comes up to choose the “company profiles” format.

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Searching on Hewlett Packard you will get the following results:

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The record for the headquarters location of Hewlett Packard, which is in Palo Alto, CA shows:

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As you can see you get corporate information as well as hyperlinks to articles about the company. This gives similar information to American Business but also some unique information. This lists company name, address, phone, fax, type of business, variant names, subsidiaries, SIC Codes, sales, employees, year founded, fiscal year, features, magazine and newspaper links, stock exchange, ticker symbol, SMSA codes, website, toll free phone number, executives and titles and e-mail addresses. It gives SIC codes but not NAICS codes. There is less information here, but different information so use both to find out everything possible about the companies you are interested in.

If you click on the sales and management hyperlink you will get the following screen:

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INFOTRAC ONEFILE

If you want to make sure you have found all of the articles pertinent to your search you may want to search InfoTrac OneFile. The screens and search strategies are the same as the Gale Group puts out both Business and Company Profile ASAP and InfoTrac OneFile. Business and Company Profile ASAP is a sub-set of InfoTrac OneFile. A search by company profile is not available in InfoTrac OneFile and you will not have access to the corporation profiles in InfoTrac OneFile.

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Doing a keyword search in Business and Company Profile ASAP and in InfoTrac OneFile will yield a different set of search results. InfoTrac OneFile includes many general magazines not covered in Business And Company Profile ASAP. These databases allow you to translate your HTML articles to Spanish, French, Japanese, German, Italian, Portuguese, Chinese and Korean. The Asian languages use their alphabets not the English alphabet.

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As you can see the search finds magazines, Academic Journals, Books, Newspapers, Multimedia and more results.

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A keyword search searching the entire article on Hewlett Packard in Business and Company Profile ASAP will show 141,938 hits while a search in InfoTrac OneFile will yield 289,637 hits if you check under all of the tabs including magazines, academic journals, reference, news and multimedia.

To make sure you have all of the information available you will find yourself searching many of the available databases at PPLD as the coverage in each database is unique and the results found will have some overlap but also provide you access to many new facts and figures. If you search All-in-One and InfoTrac OneFile you will have access to over 10,000 articles from magazines, newspapers and other source documents.

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DUN AND BRADTREET MILLION DATABASE

This is also a company profile database. The simple search allows you to search by company name, phone number or SIC code.

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A search for Hewlett Packard yields the following information.

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Clicking on the first listing which indicates it is the Palo Alto location and is the headquarters for HP you get the following screen:

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The information found includes information from the D&B Million Dollar Directory, Dun’s Business Rankings and some information from Hoover’s as well. It includes: D-U-N-s number, company name, address, county, MSA, location type, subsidiary status, manufacturing indicator, plant/facility size, owns/rents, foreign trade, year established, ownership, accountant, prescreen score, stock ticker, phone, fax, website, Hoover’s comprehensive record, employee count (current and last four years), sales, company family tree, executive names, titles and biographies, SIC codes, lines of business, products, and NAICS code.

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The advanced search screen shows the categories you can combine to get specific lists. You can search on company, location, industry, size and contact criteria. Company criteria includes name, parent, location type, subsidiary status, stock ticker, D-U-N-s number, D&B prescreen score, import/export, public/private, owns/rents, new listing, year established, bank name, accountant name, and minority or women owned. The location criteria include continent, country, state/region, city, county, MSA, and area code or zip code. The industry criteria includes SIC or NAICS code, product category, line of business, and manufacturing indicator. The size criteria include employment, sales, employment trend, plant/facility size and student enrollment. The contact criteria includes job function, job title, executive name or biography, fax, phone or toll free number and web address.

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You must choose each criteria and then click on add criteria until you get all of the criteria you want and then run the search.

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To search for Colorado Springs women owned businesses you choose the criteria and then you retrieve the following screen.

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Dun and Bradstreet covers the larger companies and finds 21 companies that fit this criteria out of the 338 companies in the database that are found in Colorado Springs.

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BUSINESSDECISION

BusinessDecision is a database that allows you to search for GIS, demographic and socioeconomic information on consumers in El Paso and Teller Counties. The searches that are created are saved by BusinessDecision for you to access or edit at a later date. Searches are saved for six months.

To start searching in this database you accept the End-user licensing agreement. Then you log in to use the database. You can choose to log in as an express user or you can set up your own account by choosing to log in as a new user. To do this you must set up an account by answering questions and providing an e-mail address. By doing this you block anyone else who is using the database to see what searches you have run. They are kept separate from the other searches done by express users. Anyone can edit searches done in the express user log on, but only you can edit or view the searches done when you log in as a new user and then as a returning user. The results from the searches you have done are also sent to you in e-mail so you can continue to do other searches or tasks while waiting for the results.

Temporarily everyone is a new user. The capability of being a returning user is under construction at this time and the screen will appear a little different when this is finished.

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The first screen shows past searches and allows you to start your new search or choose an old one you want to update and run.

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The searches are fairly easy once you do one. You can search on an address, intersection or place on a map. To start a search you click on Start a new project and then name your project. More complicate searches are also possible.

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You put in the address or other information you wish to search and then click on go. A standard map will come up showing the area you have chosen. If the address chosen could be misinterpreted it will come up with the possible addresses available in the database as is shown below because using a direction in the address will bring up potential other addresses in El Paso and Teller counties because we have many streets that are designated north, south, east or west.

Click on the address shown if it is correct and click on refresh map, then choose the distances you want in your search. This can be done in tenths of a mile or miles. If you chose a distance that would go outside of the map shown it will stop at the boundaries of El Paso and Teller counties.

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The above map shows distances of 1 mile, 2 miles and 3 miles which is the default for the database when rings are chosen. Click on next to go to the next screen and continue picking your criteria. The next screen identifies your search so far and allows you to click on choose reports.

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Name your report and click on save and choose report.

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Click on run a report or run a batch of reports and choose the ones you want.

These eight reports are provided free to users. These include the Tapestry report which details 65 groups consumer groups and tells you which one occupy the search area designated. The Tapestry report includes segment code, segment name, lifemode group, and urbanization group. This tapestry manual which includes the one page summary for each group and the methodology of the database is available from Terry Zarsky by calling 531-6333 x2308 or e-mailing tzarsky@ and asking to have the 93 page pdf file sent to you by e-mail or printed out for pick up at one of the library branches.

Each segment name is one page in length and includes: demographic, socioeconomic, residential, and preferences sections. Demographics include households, household types and culture. It gives demographics on the group and includes average age of the community. It also includes information regarding race and diversity. Socioeconomic includes income, labor force and median net worth. Residential includes household types, owner vs. rent, and age of structures and values of the homes. Preferences includes type of lifestyle and spending patterns including what the spend money on, leisure activities, reading materials and types of stores shopped at. It also

includes the types of media they read or listen to.

Finalize your report by clicking on the site address given. Then click on run reports.

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The next screen shows report status:

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The following screen will appear until the process is complete and your reports show up as retrievable.

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You then click on each link and save the data shown. A complete report with three distances chosen is approximately 78 pages in length.

Sample screens for each of the reports follow. Data is given for 2000, 2009 and 2014 so you have figures for the past, present and projections for the future on which to base your decisions

The following reports are shown: Tapestry segmentation area profile, market profile, graphic profile, demographic and income profile, housing profile, census 2000 summary profile, retail goods and services expenditures, and the standard map. Information included covers population, housing, gender, age, income, labor force, travel time, number of cars owned, education levels and much more. For assistance with this database please call 389-8968 during library hours.

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1/2010 TZ

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In order to avoid copyright disputes, this page is only a partial summary.

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