Wellington
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Thus, how many people know that Wellington’s Public City Library has a Business InformationSpecialist?
What’s more, for those businesses looking for market information, Marilyn Domney is able toprovide an hour’s free research (you’ve just got to have a library card!). Given that Marilynknows how to ‘drive’ different search engines, and that the library’s ponyed up for manyin-depth publications which would cost an average person an arm and a leg to access, it’s aremarkably good opportunity to find out stuff.
“There’s a huge amount of material out there from a science and business point of view thatGoogle may or may not be able to access,” Marilyn says. “In particular, getting hold of the fulltext [as opposed to a summary] is something we often have available through our databases.”
She says a lot of online information is only available to subscribers which Google’s indexercan’t access.
Some of this information (again requiring a library card) is available through the library’s
Acquiring this information would, otherwise at times, cost thousands of dollars.
“A lot of New Zealand businesses don’t realise the range of reports and figures they can findthrough the library,” she says. “It’s part of making the library more relevant to differentgroups of people.”
Marilyn says often she’ll sit down with people, and go through the resources and databases.“Sometimes people don’t know what they want till we stumble across it, and one advantage ofbeing in this role for a while is I know where to look.”
Marilyn recently had a 20-strong group of Wellington fashion designers in for a demonstration ofwhat they could dig down and discover.
“They were blown away. Say some of them were looking to go to Australia; with our resourcesthey could find out a wealth of information.”
As they say, knowledge is strength, and knowing as much as possible about a market beforeentering it can save a mountain of money and time and pain.
Good on Marilyn for making more people aware of the service.
Some of the topics Marilyn's been asked to look for outside of the usual business /industry typequeries - eco-art, Cultural history of afternoon teas in NZ, ethical jewellery, e-waste, craftbeer, pacific health initiatives
And being the good marketer she is, she provided the following information as places to go tofind more of the same.
www.wcl.govt.nz home page
www.wcl.govt.nz/business business pages
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