Purdue Libraries and School of Information Studies News

MEL’s Database of the Week for 11/5/10

November 5th, 2010

Welcome to Database of the Week — a feature from the Management & Economics Library (MEL). These database snapshots will give you basic information about our most relevant and beneficial online resources.

This Week’s Featured Database: WARC, from World Advertising Research Center, Ltd.

Link: www.lib.purdue.edu/mel, in the pull down Quick Access to Business Databases alpha list right below the Libraries’ search box.

Description/focus: WARC is a marketing and advertising information service used by media, ad, and market research agencies.

Start with this hint: WARC has a great interface. Click on one of the fields along the top and you’ll see the newest reports on that topic plus options for further breakdown.  For example, click on Consumers and see the breakdown on the left beginning with broad topics such as Target Audiences, (further categorized into B2B, Ethnic and minorities, Women, Youth, etc.), or Understanding Consumers (broken down into Motivation, Segmentation, others).  The center column shows the newest reports, such as Islamic branding, and Recession mindset. Back at the top, enter your subject in the search box at the top of the page or in an advanced search… try social media.

Other common tools available in this database: save selected hits online for later retrieval; email selected hits to yourself; fulltext; filters for source by title or type of document (article, case study, etc.); limit by date. For more on use of these tools in this database, contact Mary Dugan

Why you should know this database: WARC content includes news stories, case studies, conference papers, checklists (key items to cover on marketing projects), speeches and quotes, data, scholarly journals, and WARC’s own reports, which are updated frequently.  The subjects that are covered include media research, market research, trends, best practices, and more.

How this database can be integrated into the curriculum: Using WARC is very easy to do so even students who are novice database searchers will be able to find marketing or consumer information.

Cost: Paid by the Libraries annually.

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Database of the Week comes to you from the Management & Economics Library (MEL). Our intent is to give you a brief introduction to a database that you may not know.  If you would like more information about this database, or if you would like a demonstration of it for a class, contact kranlib@purdue.edu.  Database of the Week is archived  at https://blogs.lib.purdue.edu/news/category/MGMT/.  For more Purdue Libraries news, follow us on Twitter (@PurdueLibraries).

If you would like us to promote your favorite database, send an email to mdugan@purdue.edu.