For those who are not familiar with Emerald, it refers to both a prized variety of beryl as well as the name of a major publishing group in the realm of academia. And with any "major" company, we really like when they dole out free swag, because, well, it's usually good swag. While Emerald tragically is not giving away their mineral namesakes, we can't complain about their Multimedia Zone. It deserves a (green perhaps?) thumbs-up for being seeded with some kernels of business insight in the form of short videos and podcasts for anyone's viewing and listening pleasure. First dig into the Talking Management video channel, which per Emerald, "features insightful interviews with leading business figures and management writers." Then if you still haven't gotten enough, try burrowing into the Podcasts page, where you can listen in or view the transcripts- they read not unlike news articles- to uncover new insights across a range of business topics.
Cycling for Libraries - Day 4 - The Longest Day
Day 4 - 63 miles This was the longest ride of the trip. We were in the saddle for 6 hours (do you like the new biking lingo?) breaking our own personal records for most miles cycled! We rode through the Latvian forest, toured two community libraries, visited a castle, and stayed the night at a rehabilitation spa in the mountains.
We were welcomed at every single library we visited, but the Alluzi Public Library greeting had to be the best! The neighborhood kids made us signs, the librarians fed us delicious soup for lunch, and then the kids led us on the library tour.
Inside, the Alluzi Library is bright and cheery - we loved the open doors and fresh air.
Following a beautiful concert in one of Latvia's most architecturally significant churches, we rode to Sigulda where we went through a beautiful botanical garden and stopped for a few minutes at a castle. Check out this amazing view, it even includes yet another castle. The entire day was like cycling in a fairy tale. We even had cake and coffee in the beautiful forest. It was truly magical, even if we did have to stay out of the wet grass to avoid ticks and Tick-borne encephalitis. Every fairly tale has it's dark side, right?
The Sigulda Public Library is a shining example of a new community library and it had all the latest equipment and the cutest children's room. They welcomed us with a beautiful selection of fresh berries. Just the pick me up we needed in the late afternoon.
When we got to Sigulda we thought we had made it to our stop for the night. Not so fast! Turns out this was just a short stop.
Karen had to make a much bigger stop after this library due to her second flat tire of the day. Because we didn't have the necessary equipment with us to make the repair, our excellent bicycle repair team of Patrick Otton and Michel Guegan (to whom we are eternally grateful) wasn't able to change the tire. So, Karen's bike was transported on top of a Yugo that was traveling with our group, and Karen got to ride the last few km in style in the Yugo.
We were behind schedule and a couple hours late so we didn't get to tour of the paper mill, but we were not too late to catch the band playing for us on top of the mountain. Not a great picture, but if you look up you can see the railings and the band is on that stage. We were exhausted by this point, but there were a few diehards that even did a little polka.
Then, we were back on the road, or shall I say mountain, to get to out hotel outside of Ligatne for the evening. I don't think the last few hills were that steep, but you should know that the previous 20 miles were on a washboard dirt road and did I mention just moments before we thought were done riding for the day? That will mess with your head. After a great dinner and a warm shower, we were were ready for bed. We had done it. We completed the longest day of the tour, but we had 7 more days to go.
Stay tuned for more of our cycling adventures!
By April Kessler and Karen Holt of Librarian Lifestyle. April and Karen are librarians at the University of Texas at Austin and they are missing their cycling buddies and the deep library discussions they had on the road.
bizologie Favorite Apps: Super PAC App
It's everyone's favorite time of year. Political campaign ads 24/7. Oh, it's not your favorite time of year? Wondering how much of what you hear on these ads is true? (Hint: Probably not much.) Time to download the Super PAC app. When an ad starts "a user can hold up her phone to identify the commercial and receive objective, third-party information. The Super PAC App allows the user to rate the ad, while understanding who and how much money is behind the ad, what claims the ad is making, and whether those claims are based on facts." Ah, facts. Refreshing. The app is free and currently available for iPhone. Check out the video to learn more about the Super PAC app.
Introducing... Super PAC App from superpacapp on Vimeo.
Cycling for Libraries - Day 2 & 3
Day 2 - 23 miles cycled After the fist day and and a whirlwind of library tours, day 2 was double the cycling and only one library visit. The 23 miles seemed more difficult, because it was unseasonably warm in Lithuania. That day we got our first glimpse of the types of cycling we were in for - mountain bike trails and hills. Along the route we were surprised and thrilled to be supported by members of the Lithuanian Library Association. The group wore bright green t-shirts and followed us in cars along the route and honked and waved and met us at our destination in Trakai. Their support made a huge difference long, hot ride.
After lunch we had one of our first cultural visits when we visited the beautiful castle on the lake in the picturesque vacation town of Trakai.
When the castle tour was over we loaded our bikes on a truck and filled up two buses with librarians for a 4-hour ride into Latvia.
During the bus ride we got to meet more of colleagues when we had discussions about our library careers and future plans. We arrived in Riga a few hours late so we skipped the showers and jumped on a train into the city for a traditional Latvian dinner.
Day 3 - 13.5 miles
On day 3 we had another police escort through the city of Riga. This was the first time we saw what kind of press was following the tour. It reminded us first hand that one of the goals of Cycling for Libraries is to bring awareness to libraries and library services. That morning we were interviewed by the Latvian news as were waiting for the Latvian Minister of Culture to meet our group.
The backdrop for the interviews was the construction site National Library of Latvia which opens next year.
Even though Day 3 was spent in the city of Riga, we had a packed day. After meeting with the mayor, we cycled through the city to a charming public library. There is nothing quite like cycling through a city with a police escort. All of the streets were open to us and it felt like being in a parade. We greeted many curious passerbys with rings of our bells and shouts of hello.
Following the ride in the city and a tour of the Turiba University Business Library, we turned our thoughts to current library issues, namely librarians and entrepreneurship. We gave a very brief talk about the way libraries could foster entrepreneurship among staff. Åke Nygren followed us with a very interesting talk about his work and his powerful ideas on libraries and entrepreneurship.
We capped the evening by taking a Riga tour of our choice. On offer were tours of a bike shop, an adventure tour, the Art Nouveau tour, and a craft/maker evening. Being an architecture lover, Karen choose the Art Noveau tour, which featured a fascinating personalized tour of the Art Nouveau architecture in Riga and the beautiful Art Nouveau Museum. (Highly recommend for anyone traveling to Riga.)
Then, it was off to bed to prepare for our longest day of cycling.
By Karen Holt of Librarian Lifestyle and April Kessler. April and Karen are librarians at the University of Texas at Austin and had an amazing time at Cycling for Libraries.
Cycling for Libraries (aka Living Without a Hair Dryer for 2 weeks) - Day 1
Photo by Panu Entresse
Day 1 - 12.5 Miles Cycled
We met at the National Library of Lithuania with our luggage, bikes, and our newfound crazy love for cycling with 100 people we didn't yet know.
The day began as quite a few of our Cycling for Libraries days would. We mingled, did some stretches led by the fantastic Patrick Otton, hopped on our bikes, and followed the police escort that took us to several beautiful libraries in Vilnius, including a new branch library of Vilnius University that opens in September, the Vilnius Gediminas Technical University Library, the Lithuanian Technical Library, and the Vilnius University Library.
Karen Holt at the cool new Scholarly Communication and Information Center of Vilnius University.
Founded in 1570, Vilnius University Library is the oldest academic library in Lithuania.
Cycling for Libraries participants at the Vilnius University main library in the oldest room in the library
One thing that we discovered on the tours this day is the trend for individual subject-based reading rooms in Baltic Libraries. We really love the concept of the reading rooms. Each one has its own look and feel and we found them all very charming.
Asian Studies Reading Room at Vilnius Gediminas Technical University Library
Philology Reading Room
Graduate Study Carrels with a view at Vilnius University
Another trend we discovered in the Baltics is that whether you are at a cafe or a library, blankets are always on hand to keep you warm. This could be a trend for us to bring back, especially since our library is always freezing in the summer.
Blankets on a book cart at Vilnius University Library
Stay turned for more information on the amazing places we saw over the 11 day tour. If you are just catching up, be sure to read all about the Cycling for Libraries Unconference and see the route.
Day 1 Video
By Karen Holt of Librarian Lifestyle and April Kessler. Karen and April are librarians at the University of Texas at Austin and are still coming off the high of cycling through the Baltics and seeing the coolest libraries and meeting amazing librarians.
The Beginning of Cycling for Libraries aka Hanging Out in Vilnius
We arrived in Vilnius, Lithuania, three days before the start of Cycling for Libraries, so we had a chance to explore this great city. (For those of you who haven’t heard of Cycling for Libraries, it is an unconference featuring two weeks of library workshops, debates, and tours with a diverse group of international librarians. This year the unique format combined library discussions with 387 miles of bicycling from Vilnius, Lithuania to Tallinn, Estonia. Yep, that’s right, we biked through the Baltics and solved global library issues! The 100+ participating librarians came from 26 countries and worked for national, public, academic, and special libraries. We’ll be writing more about the cycling and library tours in the next few posts.)
Vilnius’s new airport was quaint and easy to navigate. We were greeted with signs advertising “Recharge in Vilnius!”which turned out to be exactly what we did there. While walking around town for 7 hours (trying to beat jet lag), we saw some great gems. If you’re traveling to Vilnius, we highly recommend a visit to Vingio Park, a relaxing park dating back to the 16th century with a really cool Soviet-era stadium where both the annual Lithuanian song festival and Lady Gaga appear in concert. You can rent bicycles there, run through the beautiful forest paths, or just bring a book and chill in the park.
Vingio Park stadium
Gediminas Castle was completed in 1409 and a wonderfully restored tower remains today. You can take a funicular or the stairs up to the top, where you are rewarded with glorious views of the city that show the juxtaposition of the old and the new architectural styles.
View of Vilnius from Gediminas Castle
We were very charmed by Vilnius. The Old Town was picturesque, the restaurants were excellent, and the shopping was some of the best we’ve experienced in Europe. Plus, there’s nothing like sitting in a cafe with a latte watching the rain to make you fall in love with a city.
Our Favorite Places in Vilnius:
Sue’s India Raja totally knocked our socks off. Mint chicken may not sound good, but after one bite, you’ll be hooked. Who knew that the best Indian food we’ve had outside of India would be in Lithuania?
The Coffee Inn chain is the Starbucks of Lithuania, but so much better. Great furniture, free wifi, and good coffee. Recommend are the Frappes and the Almond Latte.
Alchemikas Cocktail Lab – They handcraft the most delicious cocktails. Each drink is a 5-minute work-of-art and as tasty as it is pretty. At half the price of what you would pay in the US, it is also a bargain.
Rental Bike Pick-Up
Picking up our rental bikes from BaltiCCyle for Cycling for Libraries was quite the adventure. We went to the bike shop in the Old Town and were told that the Cycling for Libraries had a special pickup location at the “bike warehouse.” The description of the warehouse was “Go to the big white building with a hook.” Huh? Once we found the building (you’ll note in the picture that the hook was much more obvious than one would imagine), we followed the spray painted signs to the back, where we could pick up our bikes. After a 3 hour ordeal, where we met many of our cycling colleagues, we set out on the streets of Vilnius by bike with our Po Campo bags in tow.
The building with the bike warehouse in the back.
One of many spray painted green bicycle signs leading us to our destination.
After hours of waiting, we had our bikes!
That night we had our first informal meeting at Town Hall, where we got to meet many more members of our new cycling family. We had a great dinner of traditional Lithuanian food, including potato pancakes and beet soup, which comes with more potatoes, the theme of the entire trip. (Seriously, after two weeks of potatoes twice a day, we can never eat another boiled potato. Luckily, we had Chef Pasi on the bike ride and he fed us the most amazing meals ever out of a tent.)
Many of the Cycling for Libraries participants at the Vilnius Town Hall the night before it all started.
Beet soup with potatoes – yum!
Stay tuned for more posts about all of the exciting adventures we had on the road with Cycling for Libraries in Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia!
By Karen Holt of Librarian Lifestyle and April Kessler. Karen and April are librarians at the University of Texas at Austin and are now super fit after biking nearly 400 miles with amazing librarians from around the world.
bizologie Favorite Tools: Bliss Control
So, so simple but so, so useful. Bliss Control helps you easily change settings on your social networks. Need to change 3rd Party Settings on your Facebook Account? Or recover your password for Pinterest? It's always a pain to remember where such things are located on all our different social networks. Bliss Control handles it for you. Simply click one box for the feature you'd like to change and the second box for the social network that needs changing. BlissControl then takes you straight to the page on that social network. So convenient. No signing up or logging in, just click go and you've got what you need. You can keep up with all of our favorite resources and tools here.
Warming to ReportLinker
I felt conflicted as I began writing this because it goes against the grain of a bizologist to recommend commercial products when there is so much cool business info available online. I recently had a reference question though that brought me through ReportLinker, so I decided to revisit it outside of my fancy schmancy work subscription to see what’s what. Here’s the good non-subscription stuff: News: In the Top Stories + Archive you’ll find four categories of news: Business, Economy, Finance, and World. Unfortunately the news pages are not searchable by keyword, which is supremely annoying because you have to browse in hopes of finding a story that’s relevant to your research. But, if you do find one, you will be delighted at the amount of analysis and forecasting (read: excerpts from MarketLine reports) that goes into it. Conclusion: Hot if you find what you need, but otherwise tepid.
Industry Overviews: From the homepage there are links to major industries and sub-segments, e.g. Consumer Goods -> Footwear. Click the “more” button on the Footwear page, you get a solid, citations included, executive summary of the industry including Regional Markets, Industry Leaders, and Market Outlook. Conclusion: Improving by degrees!
A note on subscribing: Naturally RL wants you to give them money for their assemblage of “public” reports for download. Of course they keep titles vague and don’t tell where they sourced them lest you go find them yourself. On the other hand, when I drilled to the point-of-subscription, I was pleased to see the tag read $56 for a day of access. Conclusion: Factors like time constraints and the number of reports RL has on a given topic might make the day pass a temperate investment.
bizologie is now on Pinterest
We've talked before about using Pinterest for business research, and today we're unveiling our new Pinterest page. Give us a follow and we'll do our best to keep you informed not only with all things business research, but some fun things as well.
Cycling for Libraries, Last Day! - Video
Here are the highlights of the last day of Cycling for Libraries featuring bizologie’s own April Kessler and Librarian Lifestyle’s Karen Holt:
The Gateway to Associations Is Through The ASAE
Happy Friday everyone! Those who follow bizologie know that we are major advocates for association pages, and we occasionally have Professional Associations Spotlight segments like this one. So what happened when I came upon an association of…wait for it….associations? Research magic, in the form of a database called the Gateway to Associations, a great free directory courtesy of the American Society of Association Executives (ASAE), was what happened.
Sure it’s easy to Google for associations; I do it all the time. But I, like the rest of you, am lazy and rarely go past the second page of results unless I’m digging for info on an erudite topic. Hence I was delighted when I tested the Gateway database, by doing a search for Association names containing: solar. I received 18 links to titles including solar associations, corporations, and societies, and they all included the city where they are based.
In comparison if I google for: solar association, I receive 10 results on the front page, not including three advertisements plus a few more links categorized as news. My results were by no means identical; each (first) page listed associations that the other didn’t, but culling information from multiple sources to acquire a more robust breadth of knowledge is a trademark of our work.
P.S. Remember to be careful when searching with ultra generic keywords like “green” in a database. Yes “green” can refer to tree-hugging innovation, but it can also refer to localities with lots of trees, or even just the color.
Cycling for Libraries Day 10 - Video
Here are the highlights of Day 10 of Cycling for Libraries featuring bizologie’s own April Kessler and Librarian Lifestyle’s Karen Holt:
Infographic on U.S. Tablet Users from ComScore
Two Free Resources for Advertising Data
I'm frequently asked for advertising data and have limited access to any paid advertising databases or publications. Below we'll talk about a couple of free resources, but this is a good time to remind ourselves how beneficial creative Googling can be. Using the same tactics we talked about for finding free market research reports, we can also find free advertising data. Using searches like "mobile advertising" or "top ad agencies" and then limiting to PDFs can help you locate all kinds of free reports or white papers. Image searching can be helpful as well. As an example, try this image search: emarketer mobile advertising. Lots of very helpful charts! These types of searches can also lead you to organizations that provide other free resources. Here are a couple of our favorite ones for advertising: IAB's Industry Data & Landscape--"The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) is comprised of more than 500 leading media and technology companies that are responsible for selling 86% of online advertising in the United States." While some reports on the IAB's site are for members only, they have quite a few free reports. On their Industry Data & Landscape page, you'll find revenue and trend reports, as well as more specific reports such as sports fans and mobile usage. They've even got a brand new report out called "2012 Olympic Games Go Mobile: United Kingdom Vs. United States".
Duke University's Digital Advertising Collection--"The Hartman Center for Sales, Advertising & Marketing History in Duke's Special Collection Library acquires and preserves printed material and collections of textual and multimedia resources and makes them available to researchers around the world." Aside from being a great, free resource, this site is lots of fun. Thousands of advertisements from magazines, billboards, bus benches and any other venue you can think of all the way back to the 1800s. They offer several ways to search their collection including company, product, date, publication, format, subject, medium, headline and audience. Once you've found an ad, you'll see a bit of information about it including dates, publications, medium, etc.
Cycling for Libraries Days 7-9 - Video
Here are the highlights of Days 7-9 of Cycling for Libraries featuring bizologie’s own April Kessler and Librarian Lifestyle’s Karen Holt:
Cycling for Libraries, Day 6 - Video
Here are the highlights of Day 6 of Cycling for Libraries featuring bizologie’s own April Kessler and Librarian Lifestyle’s Karen Holt:
Cycling for Libraries, Day 5 - Video
Here are the highlights of Day 5 of Cycling for Libraries featuring bizologie’s own April Kessler and Librarian Lifestyle’s Karen Holt:
Cycling for Libraries, Day 4 - Video
Here are the highlights of Day 4 of Cycling for Libraries featuring bizologie's own April Kessler and Librarian Lifestyle's Karen Holt:
Three Key Business Plan Resources
People often conduct business research with the intent of using it to inform a business plan. So where should you visit on the interwebs to find a good business plan how-to? 1. The United States Small Business Administration has a thorough guide that walks you lists the major component of within a business plan, and if you need to bounce your plan off a sounding board, they can help you find a mentor too.
2. In terms of sheer volume, Bplans.com offers hundreds of free sample business plans across most industry categories, making the odds reasonably good that you will find a comparable plan to give you inspiration. Unfortunately their sample charts and financials are largely for show, unless you actually shell out money for plan-writing software that holds your hand througout the process.
3. The Center for Business Planning has a selection of winner plans from the prestigious Venture Labs Investment Competition (formerly the Moot Corp Competition) which is hosted by none other than UT Austin. While the companies are not necessarily real, the time and effort invested by the student compeitors certainly are, making this twenty-some-odd series of plans worth reading.
Note: As you're perusing the plans' intro page, it may not be readily apparent that links to the rest of the plan are available through the small blue Table of Contents box at the bottom of the page (see pic).
Cycling for Libraries, Day 2 & 3
As most of you know, bizologie co-founder April Kessler and Librarian Lifestyle's Karen Holt are participating in Cycling for Libraries where they'll be riding with 107 librarians from 26 countries through the Baltics. Karen & April will be posting pictures and stories about their trip soon, but in the meantime here are a couple of videos from Days 2 & 3 from Cycling for Libraries: