South Carolina's
Digital Library

Paul Lewis

This huge electronic database, called DISCUS for short, levels the playing field for small businesses by allowing them to easily access information that used to be the province of large, wealthy companies only. And you don't have to be a businessperson to use this service; it's free to any South Carolina citizen who holds a valid public library card.

Paul Lewis is a reference librarian at the University of South Carolina-Aiken who specializes in government information resources. He is a firm believer that libraries play an important role in economic development. (DISCUS product descriptions in this article were taken largely from print and Web site marketing brochures.)

The DISCUS Custom Newspapers service provides full-text access to more than 100 national and international papers including The New York Times and The Atlanta Journal.

Reliable, timely business information can be quite costly. For example, a leading high-technology industry market research company, In-Stat/MDR, regularly charges $2,000 to $3,000 for a single study report. Who pays that kind of money? For a large corporation considering a move into a new line of business, $3,000 might be a bargain. But the same price would probably be prohibitively expensive for small- or medium-size businesses.

South Carolina businesses that lack corporate deep pockets for market research and competitive intelligence, however, have an extraordinary information asset they can tap into to compensate for this inequity. Businesses of all types in the Palmetto State can freely access enormous electronic collections of exceptionally well-organized, reliable, and continuously updated business, government, academic, and other types of information via the World Wide Web through a service called DISCUS—South Carolina's Digital Library.

DISCUS, an acronym derived from Digital Information for South Carolina USers, is a program managed by the South Carolina State Library in cooperation with public, school, and academic libraries across the state. DISCUS includes full-text reference works, newspapers, scholarly journals, and business and industry trade publications among other resources. DISCUS is a collection of commercially developed, subscription-based online databases. Some DISCUS databases are selected to meet the needs of middle or high schools for class projects and term papers. Other DISCUS databases are more appropriate for university undergraduate and graduate courses and professional-level research projects.

“Full-text” is an important concept to emphasize because the beauty of DISCUS is that it brings complete articles, reports, and other data straight to your computer in seconds for your immediate use. Most, though not all, of the materials found in DISCUS are full-text. Rapid access to the full content of information resources based on specific needs makes users more productive by reducing effort and time spent on many research projects.

Funding for DISCUS comes from the South Carolina legislature and the federal government. Students and teachers at participating educational institutions enjoy free access to DISCUS through their school Web site. In addition, public libraries provide free access to their local communities. DISCUS is also available to South Carolina citizens in their homes and workplaces via the World Wide Web. Remote access (i.e., access away from the public library) is granted to any South Carolina citizen who holds a valid public library card. And, of course, library cards are issued free of charge to citizens. So, any business professional in the state who possesses a local public library card may access the world-class information resources DISCUS offers at no cost via their Internet connection from home or work. Public libraries generally provide prominent links to DISCUS databases on their Web site homepages. Individuals should contact their local public library to obtain DISCUS password information

Not Just for Homework Anymore

The DISCUS LegalTrac database is used to find articles in all major law reviews, law journals, specialty law and bar association journals, and legal newspapers.

In September 2004, the DISCUS Project began an outreach effort to raise awareness of the valuable resources it offers to educators and students in the state. A clever, “Got Homework?” marketing campaign promoted DISCUS by way of 50 highway billboard signs in communities around the state. This was an important step toward generating greater DISCUS use within the educational community in South Carolina. However, one very important user group the campaign did not target is business professionals. This is unfortunate because businesses can benefit greatly by putting DISCUS to work serving their information needs. Full-text resources available through DISCUS can help tremendously with market research, strategic planning, human resource management, government regulatory compliance, information technology planning, etc.

Several of the databases provided through DISCUS deserve the special attention of business professionals. The DISCUS Business & Company Resource Center (BCRC), for example, provides an integrated, comprehensive periodical and reference resource for business, management, and investment topics. BCRC includes PROMT®--Predicast's Overview of Markets and Technology with global coverage of companies, products, markets, and technologies through full-text articles from international trade and business journals, industry newsletters, and newspapers. Another BCRC database, Newsletters ASAP, provides content from today's most popular and highly respected business and industry newsletters. Another commercial business information service available in the DISCUS BCRC is Investext Plus. This service offers in-depth reports that give users access to the same research and analysis tools used by leading investment banks, consulting firms, and law firms. In all, the DISCUS Business & Company Resource Center databases provide access to 4,000 indexed (more than 2,900 full-text) titles from academic journals and general business periodicals, newsletters, newspapers, newswire services, and reference tools.

The DISCUS Custom Newspapers service provides full-text access to more than 100 national and international papers including the New York Times and the Atlanta Journal. NewsBank, another DISCUS service, covers the Columbia, South Carolina-based The State Newspaper with access to archived articles going back to 1987, and The Greenville News newspaper from 1999 to the present.

The DISCUS LegalTrac database is used to find articles in all major law reviews, law journals, specialty law and bar association journals, and legal newspapers. Included are articles on federal and state law cases, laws and regulations, taxation, etc. Coverage also includes British Commonwealth, European Union, and international law.

Other DISCUS databases—Expanded Academic ASAP, InfoTrac, OneFile, General Reference Center, and Biography Resource Center—offer millions of full-text articles and reports covering every facet of business and just about any other imaginable subject.

DISCUS is a very “user-friendly” research tool. Extensive documentation about the scope of individual databases, title lists, and other helpful features is easily accessible when searching. Information contained within the databases is carefully organized by hierarchical subject categories. Search on a broad topic, and DISCUS will provide a breakdown of subtopics permitting the user the ability to drill down to specific information. Keyword search engines for the DISCUS databases include simple and advanced searching screens. Extensive cross-referencing hyperlinks make the DISCUS Business & Company Resource Center an especially valuable research tool. For example, a record retrieved from a simple search for a company will include basic information about the company plus hyperlinks to detailed, related reports containing company financial statements, marketing programs, international holdings, competitors, trends in the company's industry, and much more.

Librarians at schools and libraries participating in the DISCUS program regularly provide reference assistance to users seeking information. Librarians provide user education informally through one-on-one search sessions and more formally through group or classroom presentations. Public library users should contact their local library with questions about searching DISCUS effectively.

Beyond Web Search Engines

Other DISCUS databases . . . offer millions of full-text articles and reports covering every facet of business and just about any other imaginable subject.

One way to appreciate the value of DISCUS is to compare it to what has become the most popular research tool of all time, keyword search engines on the World Wide Web. Without a doubt, Web search engines like Google and Yahoo are wonderful tools for locating information on a topic. With Google, one can search more than 8 billion Web pages in seconds. Thanks partly to the volume of material that turns up when performing a Web search, many casual Web surfers assume that if it’s not on the Web, it doesn’t exist. However, there is much more useful information on the Internet than what turns up in a typical Web engine search.

Web search engines employ little software programs called “spiders” or “bots” that are in constant motion, jumping from Web site to Web site to index the content of the world's Web pages. Web spiders, however, have limits to the types of information they can index. They scan the full text of static Web pages, along with content-descriptive “meta tags” that Web designers sometimes add to their Web pages and several proprietary file formats including Microsoft’s Word, Excel, and PowerPoint and Adobe’s portable document format (PDF) files. There are many other file formats on the Web that these spiders miss.

Beyond static pages there is another part of the World Wide Web sometimes referred to as the “deep Web” or the “invisible Web.” No one knows exactly, but experts estimate that the invisible Web is perhaps 500 times larger than the Web we see when browsing. Part of the invisible or deep Web consists of all the data information contained in all of the many thousands of databases that are accessible on the Web. A search query is required in order to search a database, and Web search engine spiders don't have the capability to do this. Take, for example, the U.S. Census Bureau's Web site. It contains enormous volumes of valuable socioeconomic data on communities across the United States. The possible methods of querying this data are infinite. Web bots can tell you about the Census Bureau and point you there, but in themselves they have no capability to access these resources. It's worth noting as well that DISCUS and other commercial databases like it also are not indexed in Web search engines.

Just the Facts

There are other issues to consider as well when limiting research just to Web search engines. For example, information that turns up in Web engine searches is often incomplete, inaccurate, biased, outdated, and generally unreliable. There are plenty of reliable information sources on the Web, but the searcher must take care to consider the source of the information. What are the credentials of individuals who have posted material? Who sponsors the Web site? Is there a review process for materials posted on the site?

Whether the task at hand is a term paper project for a school assignment or a report on industry trends for the boss, users need reliable information from authoritative sources they know they can trust. Web search engines are great, but alone are insufficient resources for serious research projects. DISCUS provides comprehensive, reliable, well-organized, authoritative, and reliable information resources to users. DISCUS is a boon to economic development in South Carolina. It levels the competitive playing field for smaller businesses in the state by putting high-quality information sources formerly available only to large corporations within easy
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