by Valorie H. Rice
Senior Specialist, Business Information
Did you ever wish you could locate an article you remember reading in a previous Arizona’s Economy issue? Maybe you cannot recall the title of a report from one of our researchers that you would like to read again. Well, now there is a way to find that! We have made our library catalog available to the public. It includes content from all of the public resources of Economic and Business Research Center (EBRC) activities, such as the Arizona’s Economy magazine, the Arizona-Mexico Economic Indicators, and the MAP Dashboard. Each article published in the Arizona’s Economy, MAP Dashboard and Arizona-Mexico Economic Indicators websites and every research study EBRC has produced can be retrieved by searching with keyword, author, date, title, or project.
The Economic and Business Research Center has always had a print library containing an archive of all our research and publications such as Arizona’s Economy, the Arizona Statistical Abstract and the many economic impact studies conducted over the years. It also includes local, state and federal government reports that contain information frequently used by Center staff in the work we do, such as those focusing on demographics or economic information for Arizona. Examples would be the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, most Arizona government offices such as the Arizona Office of Economic Opportunity and Arizona Department of Revenue, local statistics from Arizona counties and organizations such as Pima Association of Governments as well as research from other academic institutions that do similar work. As a State Data Center, we maintain a collection of U.S. Census Bureau material focusing on Arizona with data going back to the 1950’s (after all, EBRC has been around since 1949!). The vast majority of the information we use now comes to us via email or found in online reports, but there are still a handful of print reports.
The catalog tracks all of the materials we regularly consult as well as those we produce, whether in digital or paper form. Where available, the catalog provides downloadable PDFs of EBRC documents and links to many of the online reports and sources of information contained in the library.
The library catalog link is here.
Below are a few samples of searches to show how to use the catalog and what to find there. The main page has a basic search, which is a good place to start. You can search by typing in any keyword or author you want.
The advanced search tab allows you to search several parameters at once, such as subject plus author or author plus date – but the descriptions below will also provide you with ways to narrow down a search.
Here are the results for typing in ‘trade’ on the basic search. The results show recent articles from the Arizona-Mexico Economic Indicators site, the MAP Dashboard site, and the presentation slides for the most recent Breakfast with the Economists, which included a talk on trade issues.
Here are the results searching for ‘Hammond’ to find articles written by our director, George Hammond. On the left side of the screen, you see that the search can also be refined by subject, author, year, EBRC project or series title (which represent a specific series of reports, journals or presentations).
The MAP Dashboard presents MAP Talks on a regular basis featuring different topics and presenters. Here is the record for one that George Hammond presented last June. Clicking on “Access URL here” will send you to the page on the MAP Dashboard website containing the video of the presentation.
There are hints of what the records contain by hovering over the results. If there any links or PDFs attached to the record, or if there are any comments associated with a report, they will appear in a popup box. In this example of a study authored by former EBRC researchers, Alberta Charney and Alan Hoogasian, both a link and a file available along with comments regarding the study.
