Califa worked with a team of librarians to review the new financial database CoreReference, published by CoreReference, a division of Hemscott plc.
CALIFA Library Group
Review of CoreReference from CoreData,
published by Hemscott plc.
Overall Score: 2.6 out of 4
The Califa team that reviewed this database included four librarians with a specialty in business reference services. Three were from public libraries from various parts of the state including the Bay area, the central valley, and Southern California. The final member of the team was a business librarian from a university in northern California.
Each was asked to rank specified areas from 1 (no recommendation) to 4 (strong recommendation), and then provide an overall assessment, with accompanying brief narratives. Each section is averaged, and then all the scores are averaged to give a final overall score.
Search Interface (3, 3, 2, 2 Average 2.5)
Provides many options to screen companies based on financial criteria. Overall, it seems fairly user-friendly by providing the expected ability to search by ticker symbol or company name. Also, the ability to search by SIC, NAICS or by industry is strong. Strengths – provides users with ability to export data to .pdf and Excel formats, ability to create customized groups/peer groups. Weakness – limited menu in its pull-down menu for reports.
A few tricky things – the company name lookup seems unnecessarily complicated, with a popup window. Why doesn’t it just list the companies it finds, and let the user choose? I also don’t like the dropdown box for choosing different types of reports. Not only does the dropdown box hide most of the choices, most public library patrons won’t know what an EPS report is. I think tabbed displays are more effective for this kind of resource.
I feel that the home page has an excessive amount of information on it for a simple search and may lead less knowledgeable users to feel that they need to know more than that may know about a company. Doing a search on the quick search area if you know the ticker or company name is fairly easy and can be successfully accomplished without much trouble. Inexperienced searchers may find the other items in the other areas overwhelming, but experienced searcher may appreciate these specific ways of searching. No crucial features missing from the search interface.
Fortunately this database provides ways to customize the use of its incredible amount of information.
Quality of Information (4, 2, 3, 3 Average 3)
The quality of information is excellent. The display of information in each report is excellent as well. About 80% of the information is available in many other online resources (BCRC, Yahoo finance, or BigCharts).
The financial coverage is a bit weak in that the data only goes back 5 years and could do a better job of giving company history information. Some of the stock information is good but again is generally cuts off the data after 3 or 5 years. Does not seem to have the ability to modify the charting for the stock price. Does not provide links to news coverage of company. Only provides data to U.S. public companies. Financial comparisons to industry are strength.
The reports have useful information and by clicking on the drop down menu for “reports” one can get information about the company from a basic level to more detailed and specific to ones’ needs.
Help and User Support (3, 2, 2.5, 3 Average 2.6)
I did use the “help” screens for some of the screens and I did feel they were helpful and explained the information well. The website does not offer training. A telephone helpline is available along with an email address.
No printed help material provided. The lack of even a “Quick Start” guide is a real loss – it’s nice to have a 1-sheet guide to hand out to patrons. The online help is adequate, but product-based rather than task-based. Most patrons don’t care what the Advanced Search screen does; they want to find out where the P/E ratio is.
Provides adequate documentation with its help menus.
Accessibility of Service (4, 3, 3, 1 Average 2.75)
Response time and connectivity is excellent. I did not test remote authentication.
The response time is very fast.
I was able to use it and did not have problems logging in or out, but I did not use it for a long period of time. When I conducted a search I received the information quickly without any interference.
Cost (3, 3, 3, 1 Average 2.5)
The cost is reasonable, given the quantity of data.
My supervisor looked in to the cost of the current business database that we have, Mergent and found that CoreData is less expensive, but does not cover as much information.
Overall Assessment (2, 2.7, 3, 2 Average 2.4)
I cannot recommend this product for the following reasons. 1) Most of the data is available in other, free sources. Granted, Coredata has it well organized and accessible, but that’s not really worth the money. I’d have to train staff and patrons on a whole new interface, and this product isn’t compelling enough to make me want to devote a lot of time to re-training everyone. 2) Lack of usage tracking. As far as I can tell, there’s no way to track usage, which means there’s no way to find out if patrons are using the database. I need a way to account for usage if I’m going to spend money on online resources.
Further comments from my supervisor were that she found more information on Mergent like recent news articles and even for our purposes, a medium size public library system with 3 libraries, we find the price of Mergent a good middle ground and helpful for the information we get asked for by patrons.
The help pages launch new users in their searches for exactly the desired formats. However, I didn't find historical price data or up-and-coming stock splits, two types of data requested by library users. Since they seen to have sufficient access to the "CoreReference-type" data on free web sites and Morningstar.com (which was recently added at the request of library users when funds became available), we most likely won't be adding CoreReference.com in the near future. An overwhelming amount of information is available on more than one site. I am reminded of the e-mails that say "please excuse the cross posting of this message."
