A BizLibratory Experiment: Gaps in your business information knowledge

Welcome to our blog’s first Experiment. We mentioned this new short form content in our blog update here. This post will be to encourage conversation and to solicit advice. 

Recently, I picked up another subject area and will be the liaison for the Psychology and Cognitive Science departments. While I do have some background in this field, I will be consulting colleagues and resources to better help me become an (not THE) “expert” in Psychology research. Along the way, I have been thinking about my liaison duties with the College of Business and I have started to make a list of gaps in my knowledge within each program. Let’s start a conversation and I want to acknowledge that we are living in strange times. Budgets are shrinking and being innovative without funding will become a part of lives moving forward. I also want to acknowledge that using the word “gap” might be a little disadvantageous and gives a deficit mindset, so forgive me! 

Like any subject specialist, we interrogate and navigate the line of being a comprehensive knowledge base and claiming to be an “expert”. What I learned pretty quickly in picking up Psychology in the second week of the semester is that I just need to be an “information badass” (thanks Nancy!!!) and not pretend to know everything there is to know about psychology and empirical research. I was able to navigate our top psychology resources because I am great at information seeking within a database (hello MLIS degree) and I know how to seek out resources to HELP me learn what I need to know. It doesn’t help that I have database envy from peer institutions for business information. I would love to have an Entrepreneurship or Finance/Accounting librarian to collaborate with as well. When I started back in February 2019, a lot of my #bizref skills came from LIS school, and assisting small businesses and nonprofits at the public library. The former business librarian at my institution told me to take the next year to learn about working in higher education and the next 6 years to really grasp business information research. Well, I’m trying to pack it in my first 3 years! Ha! 

So, without further musings, here is my short list of areas I would like to improve my business information skills: 

• Building confidence in my finance and accounting topic areas (currently taking a few Bloomberg Market Concepts ecourses) 
• Supply Chain resources
• Teaching calculating Market Share 
• Economic Indicator resources
• Open source International Business resources
• Niche Industry/Market/Sector research 
• Real Estate market research (was just reminded that my bschool has a center focused on RE research)

Are there areas you feel like are gaps in your knowledge base? Do you have any suggestions or advice for not only resources but how to make a plan for learning development? Share any and all resources. I’m talking, libguides (BRASS has a few that’s awesome), open access databases, business data resources (do you use the World Bank Open Data portal?), and open business reference books! Anything in those realms would be great.