Volume 15, Number 6 • June 1998

According to RDS, the new RDS Business Reference Suite addresses the growing needs of organizations to understand markets, industries, clients, and competitors on a worldwide scale; to find the strategic market research data essential as decision support; and to have access to management practices information at a functional level.

RDS Business Reference Suite includes three critical types of content: 1) a wide array of international news dealing with companies, industries, and products; 2) management practices relating to the processes, methods, and strategies of managing a business; and 3) strategic data that are available in tabular format dealing with market share, forecasts, shipments, consumption, rankings, and more.

According to the company, RDS Business Reference Suite provides users with a number of features:

• A common interface for searching each database individually or in combination with one another
• Basic and advanced search modes for all types of users
• Common indexing across all databases for multi-file searching
• Fact-level indexing for quick and precise retrieval
• Drop-down menus for easy selection of all index terms
• Enhanced article titles for straightforward, relevant selection
• Unlimited access to full-text coverage for many of the world's most authoritative publications
• Standardized company and geographic names
• View, print, or download options
• Affordable pricing—with discounts for public and academic libraries

RDS Business Reference Suite provides access to more than 1,400 leading business sources worldwide, over 60 percent full text with about 45 percent international coverage, and thousands of tables with strategic data. The individual parts of RDS Business Reference Suite are as follows:

Business & Industry is RDS's multi-industry database with a global focus on market, company, product, and industry information, and an emphasis on the facts, figures, events, and trends that affect the business environment. B&I provides users with the precise, relevant, and fact-level indexing that ensures easy and successful searching. It's also useful for locating strategic data such as market share, market size, sales, trends, and forecasts, says RDS.

Business & Management Practices focuses on the processes, methods, and strategies of managing a business. It draws on hundreds of professional, academic, and trade journals that contain information relevant to the practical side of business planning, decision making, production, marketing, and technology implementation. BAMP's coverage of business methodology emphasizes real-life applications, case studies, and "how-to" guidelines. Subject coverage includes arbitration, automation, best practices, buyouts, cash and debt management, downsizing, job satisfaction, mentoring, outplacement, restructuring, succession planning, and more.

TableBase provides access to thousands of hard-to-find tables, which are drawn from trade association reports, government agencies, statistical annuals, and other hard-to-locate sources. According to the company, RDS's indexing helps find numerical data in tabular format precisely, easily, and inexpensively. All table titles are descriptive and unambiguous, and are written in a concise informative style. Tables are linked to full text, and may be optionally printed. It includes entire tables from a full-text source—not a truncated version showing only the "Top 10" entries.

"RDS Business Reference Suite is offered in response to requests we have had on a continuing basis from companies, universities, and public libraries who wish to bring access to their users of the three highly focused business databases we produce through a common interface and multi-file searching," said Dick Harris, president of RDS. "The fact that we use common indexing across our databases is a unique user benefit. Furthermore, with the suite we can now offer users essentially cover-to-cover coverage of our core full-text titles for articles with substantive content as these appear either in B&I or BAMP, depending upon their subject matter."

RDS Business Reference Suite is available to users immediately at a fixed annual subscription price scaled to the number of concurrent users or desktops that have access to the service. Networked user licenses begin at $9,000 for the entire Suite (a $1,000 savings over purchasing separate databases). Public and academic libraries are entitled to a 40 percent discount.

RDS is offering free trials of RDS Business Reference Suite to qualified organizations. Contact RDS Customer Service for more information on the free trial program and pricing at customer_service@rdsinc.com or 800/313-2212.

Source: Responsive Database Services, Inc., Beachwood, OH, 216/292-9620; Fax: 216/292-9621; http://www.rdsinc.com.

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