 Hi, my name is Gabe, and I am a librarian here at the University of Alabama, and today we will be conducting a local company search using the database Reference Solutions. This is useful for finding businesses that are not obvious to most people, especially ones that do little advertising or actively make their presence known to the average person. In addition, it can be difficult locating specific businesses or industry types in an unfamiliar geographical area. Fortunately, Reference Solutions provides easy access to this information. Today, however, we will be conducting a basic search for local companies to interview and find more information about. To get to Reference Solutions, we'll start out on the library's main page, lib.ua.edu. Then, in the upper right corner, click Databases. Once we're on the A to Z databases section, there are a few different ways to find Reference Solutions. The first would be to search for it in the search box above the frequently used databases on the right side of the screen. Alternatively, we can search by subject, that being business and economics. That drop-down box is in the top left corner of the screen. Scroll down to R's and find Reference Solutions. Once in Reference Solutions, click on either the green search button at the bottom of the screen, which you may need to scroll down to see, or click on the words US businesses in the middle of the screen. At the top of this page, there are two options to search, quick, or advanced. Typically, you would be using Advanced Search, unless you knew the name of the business or executive. We will choose Advanced Search. On the Advanced Search page, there are many different parameters to choose from on the left side of the screen. For this video, we will only focus on two, business type and geography. In the business type parameter, there are two options to choose from. Keyword, S-I-C, N-A-I-C-S, and Major Industry Group. When clicking on different parameters, expanded search elements will appear in the middle of the screen where you can narrow your search. The keyword option would be ideal in this situation because it is much simpler and easier to use with searching for keywords instead of selecting from a list. For searching in the keyword section, we will stick with the default, search all S-I-Cs, and begin with a STEM-related example, one to two-word description, such as environmental engineering. In the results, select which options you want to choose from by single clicking. I will choose engineers environmental and engineers chemical. You can also delete any unwanted choices by just single clicking on it in the selected box. Once satisfied with the keyword parameters, we will move on to the next parameter, geography. Within this parameter, there are many options to choose from, but we will select city-state. In this box, we will search for Birmingham and select the city in Alabama, as well as the same for Tuscaloosa. Finally, in the top right corner of the screen, we can see how many results will come back without having to view them yet by clicking on the blue update count button. If there is an unreasonably high number for your search, such as if it says there were 800 chemical engineering firms in Tuscaloosa and Birmingham, we need to go back and look at what went wrong in the search and correct it before going on to the results themselves. If satisfactory, we can click on the green view results button. With the results page, there are two different ways to use the data. The first is by downloading data on multiple businesses or in bulk. That will be discussed in the marketing semester. The way we will be focusing on the data is the individual businesses themselves. Once you decide a business, single click on it. Let's pick P.E.L.A. Moreau and Associates Incorporated out of Tuscaloosa as an example. There are a few boxes on the profile we will focus on for this video. The first is the location info, which lists basic contact information, addresses, etc. If a company has one, the business profile box is important to get a sense of what the company deals with on a regular basis and the overall scope of it. In addition, the management directory box is useful to find a specific person or people to get in contact with relating to the business. There are many other boxes within the profile, but those are not relevant at the moment and will be covered in depth in another video. In Recap, Reference Solutions is, for the purpose of this class, a directory to find businesses in the area that you may not be able to find just driving down the road. We went through the advanced search and used different parameters to narrow down what type of business to look for. Finally, we looked at an individual business profile to get basic contact information. If you have any questions about what was covered today, please feel free to reach out to the Business Librarians, Mark Ceciliano or Paul Brothers and Bruno. Thanks!