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Archive for the Business Reference Guides Category (18 posts)

Updated Railroads and Ship Registers Guides

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The two guides featured in today’s post have something in common – transportation.

Unloading bananas, New Orleans, Louisiana. Detroit Publishing Co.
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You might not think of either as a “business” topic but they are, because both are their own industries and because logistics – the commercial activity of transporting goods to customers – are core parts of the U.S. economy and world trade.

The railroad guide features sources for those looking at the railroads as businesses. Many of the sources deal with company specific sources from the Interstate Commerce Commission, Department of Transportation, and private publishers. It is a guide particularly focused on historical resources, because railroads as business and the industries it supported were big contributors to the U.S. economy. There are also some resources related to safety, maps, and timetables. We also included some trade literature, although there are more titles that were not included.

The guide on ship registers was really created because we have had a fair number of researchers looking for very specific information on ships.  The information they typically look for is who owned a ship when, what was the name(s) of the ship, when was it retrofitted, what was the size, what type of engines did it have, etc., so the sources provided focus mostly on that type of information.  However, there are also items about the history of shipping goods around the world, as well as timetables for passenger ships. Some shipbuilding trade literature was included because it covers shipbuilding as an industry. It publishes articles about orders for ships as well as articles about particular ships and shipbuilding companies and can include information that is not generally part of directory sources.

See our web page for a listing of all of our guides.

Silent Sky: A Case Study in Researching the Pesticide Industry

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This post was written by Lynn Weinstein, Business Reference Librarian in the Science, Technology, and Business Division. The sedge is wither’d from the lake,  And no birds sing — KEATS A recent Cornell Chronicle article reported that nearly 30 percent of birds in the North America have vanished since 1970.  Simultaneously, the population of raptors […]

Are you Researching Companies? Industries? M&A Transactions?

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We wanted to do a series of short posts about happenings on the Business Reference web page, specifically about our research guides. First, I wanted to mention that we recently published a new guide LGBTQ+ Resources in Business and the Workplace that includes materials on the issues that affect the economic circumstances of the LGBTQ+ […]

New Guides in Business Reference Services

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Our goal as librarians at the Library of Congress is to help you find information quickly. We understand that library research—especially at the Library of Congress, which has one of the most extensive collections in the world—can be overwhelming. According to the 2007 North American Title Count, there were over 1.1 million titles classified under […]

Seeing American Enterprise at the Smithsonian

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A new exhibit at the Smithsonian – American Enterprise in the Innovation wing of the National Museum of American History – is telling the history of American business and innovation.   According to the Smithsonian, this exhibit “chronicles the tumultuous interaction of capitalism and democracy that resulted in the continual remaking of American business–and American life.” […]