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By Bill Hill, Business Librarian
Grand Rapids Public Library

If it’s free, it can’t be much good. We prize what we pay for. We don’t take seriously a psychiatrist who charges less than $100 per hour or a mechanic who offers to fix our car for a six-pack of Bud Light. Other than sun, rain and a mother’s advice, anything “free” we dismiss as suspect and next to worthless.

That’s what I used to think, too.

At the library where I work — before the Internet, before electronic databases, if you can imagine that — a favorite customer, “Ralph,” used to come in about once a month. He’d give me a list of the various Economic Census reports — Producer Price Index, County Business Patterns, Housing Starts, etc. — that he required, spend a few hours copying numbers from them and return them to me with a satisfied smile.

One day I asked him what he found so cheering in the pages of statistics. He said, “Money, Bill. I just made $5,000. I do market and feasibility studies.”

Every time he came in after that, I always heard the faint ka-ching of cash register bells accompanying him like a theme song, and realized that we were sitting on valuable information, which in the right hands, could be converted into bankable cash. What’s more, it was all FREE for the asking, available to everyone who thought to ask, and knew what to do with it.

Since those days of paper archives, things at libraries have only become better for businesses, much better. Libraries purchase access to databases for their customers, that do some very expensive things like help with business plans, list building, market research, etc. But the essential problem hasn’t changed much. While it’s not quite a secret that libraries have valuable information, it’s not quite believed either. Too many business owners don’t realize the potential cash information available at their library.
Take our most popular business database, ReferenceUSA.

It’s essentially just a large database of company profiles, 14 million of them. What distinguishes it from online yellow pages is its depth of information and its customizable search capabilities.

Let’s suppose you are a marketing rep for the Bright and Shiny Company that sells cleaning supplies. You want to target all the companies in West Michigan in counties from Kent to Grand Traverse. Further, to start with you don’t want the small operations: you want manufacturers with at least 20 employees. You’d like to break the territory into manageable units, say a county at a time. Large counties have large numbers and may need to be broken into smaller units like zip codes or constituent cities. Kent County, for example, has 18,000 businesses.

Let’s limit our search to Muskegon County, looking for manufacturers of all kinds with 20 or more employees. If we run that search, we get 121 companies. Now what?

You have a choice of which elements you’d like to have: just the basic contact information, as above, or choose from a menu that includes management names, credit ratings, size, numbers of employees, sales, business codes, news stories and much more. You can sort your list by name, address, zip code, telephone number, even size of company. You may print out the list, or save it as a spreadsheet.

There is a feature now being tested that will allow searches of custom drawn territories. With that you could specify just the areas bounded by a set of streets, or within a 10-mile radius of your business address.

There are other sidekick databases included — U.S. Healthcare (855,000 doctors and dentists), Canadian Households (12 million), Canadian Businesses (1.5 million ), and U.S. Standard White Pages (89 million residents). You can do some similar fancy things with them, too.

Did I mention that you don’t have to be in the library to use ReferenceUSA? You can run your search from home or office. However, you do need either a library card to the library that offers the database (again, free) or be present in that library. Grand Rapids Public Library, Kent District Library, Kalamazoo Public Library and Capital Area District Library all offer this gem. It’s not cheap, so smaller library systems won’t have it.

And ReferenceUSA is only one of several powerful, useful tools available to you. Did I mention free? Maybe, like Ralph, you should be making some money at your library.

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