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The Libraries’
electronic databases are well known, and rightly so, as they enable
users to search through thousands of full-text journals and vast chunks
of the world’s published literature in minutes … work that
previously took months to complete.
But there has been a
second electronic revolution — one which is less well known — the
rise of electronic raw-data sources.
The Library subscribes
to a good stable of raw-data sources, and these are particularly useful
in the Commerce Library, where they serve as a research laboratory for
students of finance, accounting, marketing, and economics.
In some cases these are
the electronic versions of standard print sources such as International
Financial Statistics or World Development Indicators. With
e-versions one has the advantage of being able to filter and manipulate
the data to meet exact needs, but the principles remain fundamentally
those of the original printed source.
In other cases the data
is far more technology-dependent — only the existence of the
electronic database allows us to get near-real-time stock market data,
as-published company results, or mix-and-match relational data according
to our needs.
Reuters was
the first such database in the Commerce Library. An online news and
stock tracker with its origins back in the wire services of the early 20th
century, Reuters is used by finance students to study the
price-histories of stocks from any country in the world — making their
real-world research projects possible, and providing essential training
for their transition into the working world.
The Reuters terminals
at UCT have gone through various incarnations from their original
DOS-based ancestry through to the latest Kobra version, as quick and
subtle as its namesake. They are extremely popular with students who
often follow the markets on their own account.
With the advent of the
web, other products arose in competition. The Libraries’ first rival
to Reuters was the McGregor’s suite of databases, a spin-off of the
South African stock market Bible, Who Owns Whom (sometimes
irreverently known as Who Ate Whom).
McGregor’s Word
holds full-text company reports of every listed South African company,
going back about 10 years, and available within days of publication. It
also holds the announcements, prospectuses, and circulars for these
companies … essential reading for accounting and finance students.
McGregor’s Station concentrates
on the numbers. It is a true relational database, allowing comparison of
share prices, accounting items, or a whole range of financial ratios
across companies over a period of about twenty years.
The latest challenge to
Reuters, and the most popular among
students, is Datastream, which was recommended to us by an
academic who had been a broker in New York and London. This resource has
all the qualities of McGregor’s Station, except that its coverage is
worldwide. Every share price, every market index, all economic
variables, exchange rates, interest rates, and commodity prices for
every country on the map, and going back for decades, can be downloaded
at the touch of a button. Such relational data can be manipulated in
Excel worksheets to answer some formidable questions.
Marketing students need
numbers to crunch too. Their most popular raw-data sources are currently
the AMPS and SAMM databases, and Statistics South Africa’s
Census 2001.
AMPS (All Media Product
Survey) allows students to
cross-tabulate marketing survey data. For example, they can find the
average age, income, and gender of Cosmopolitan readers (35%
male, by the way, according to AMPS 2003), further limit the data set to
heavy cosmetics users, and see where they live, how they shop, and what
they do on the internet.
Marketing is also one
of the many disciplines that make use of the Census 2001 database
— still the definitive source of education, income, race, gender,
family, and housing data in South Africa. The breakdown of this data by
geographical area can be remarkably focussed. |
