SIC 7375
INFORMATION RETRIEVAL SERVICES



Companies in this industry are primarily engaged in providing online information retrieval services on a contract or fee basis. The information generally involves a range of subjects and is taken from other primary sources, such as the original publishers of the materials. Establishments primarily engaged in performing activities, such as credit reporting, direct mail advertising, and stock quotation services, and who also create databases are classified according to their primary activity. Establishments primarily engaged in collecting databases from primary sources and reformatting or editing them for distribution through information retrieval services are classified in SIC 7379: Computer Related Services, Not Elsewhere Classified.

NAICS Code(s)

514191 (On-Line Information Services)

Industry Snapshot

Demand for electronic information has skyrocketed with the growth of the Internet, but the resulting low-cost competition has wreaked havoc with traditional subscription information services. The information retrieval business, which usually charges customers either by the amount of information retrieved or at a flat subscription rate, has traditionally served corporate and academic researchers and librarians—audiences that were used to paying a premium for professional-quality information. This stable market has been undermined, however, as similar information has come available on the Internet, often for free.

With newspaper and magazine articles routinely available for free on the Internet, old-line full-text database services like LexisNexis and Dialog have witnessed customer flight to cheaper services. As a result, competition has gotten tougher and, in many cases, revenues at traditional providers have stagnated or fallen. Mergers, acquisitions, and partnerships were frequent in the late 1990s and early 2000s, as information providers adapted to the new marketplace. Nearly all have likewise embraced the Internet in some form, as demand has weakened for proprietary software, dial-up database connections, and CD-ROM subscriptions.

In spite of some providers' woes, however, government statistics show that the industry had an influx of new revenue in the mid- and late 1990s. In 1998 industry revenue totaled approximately $11.4 billion, up roughly 100 percent from 1995. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, by 2000 the industry had continued to achieve considerable growth. Revenues increased 64 percent between 1998 and 1999, and more than 47 percent between 1999 and 2000, reaching $27.7 billion. Although more recent government figures were not available in early 2003, by that time the information retrieval industry had been affected by a sluggish economy. Budget cuts at key customers like libraries and businesses had created a more challenging climate in the industry.

Organization and Structure

Online information services, increasingly over the Web, are the leading means of delivering electronic information. Other methods include CD-ROM, diskette, and magnetic tape. Online services are trademarked services that may or may not bear the same name as the companies that own and operate the services.

Online service companies may be considered the vendors, distributors, resellers, or retailers of informational databases that are often developed by third-party database publishers. The database publishers, often considered part of the broader "information services industry," are not part of the online services industry, however, and are usually classified by the type of publishing they perform. The data in the databases may be numeric (such as financial statistics), bibliographic (citations to periodical literature), full-text documents, directory or dictionary entries, patents, images, or even digital audio and video recordings. Most online services provide multiple databases. Specialized online services may also produce one of the databases themselves. Increasingly, there are online services that provide a combination of databases that they have developed along with others that they have licensed to redistribute.

Online services can be categorized as either business/professional research services or personal online services. Business/professional online services may be highly specialized by offering only a single set of related databases to a niche market. They may be somewhat specialized but offer multiple databases from different sources on a similar broad subject, such as the legal online services LexisNexis and Westlaw or the scientific service STN International. Finally, professional online services may be very general and offer up to hundreds of databases on all different subjects, such as Dialog or LexisNexis. Such distributors of multiple databases are most often referred to as "database vendors," and their clients are usually corporate librarians.

The largest business segments are legal and investment. Marketing, intellectual property, scientific, and credit information service needs also comprise a large portion of this market. The remainder of the industry serves a variety of niche markets. For instance, many databases are tailored specifically to one industry or profession, such as chemical, health care, civil engineering, agricultural, banking, insurance, or food service. In addition, many niche services are managed by nonprofit industry service organizations.

While the business/professional services encompass both the specialized online services and the general-subject online services, consumer information services tend to be general, offering a wide variety of databases in order to appeal to a wider market. With the emergence of the Internet, however, consumer information services have largely become indistinct from other businesses, such as electronic publishing, Internet access services, and search engines.

Indeed, by far the most pervasive form of information retrieval system, both for businesses and consumers, is the Internet search engine. Far different from the traditional information service revenue model, popular search engines are completely free to users. They instead earn money through selling advertising on the site and through electronic commerce partnerships with other firms.

Although parts of the information retrieval industry are relatively young, and therefore entrepreneurial in nature, each segment of the market tends to be dominated by one or two large firms that pose formidable barriers to smaller competitors. For instance, the market for legal information is dominated by just two competitors, LexisNexis and Westlaw—and even they have been struggling. Even niche markets tend to favor the single competitor that is first to establish a presence and to acquire ongoing access to essential copyrighted information. As a result, firms in the industry typically diversify and grow through mergers, acquisitions, or joint ventures with other companies.

Online services allow customers using computers or computer terminals to access a remote, central computer storing databases, by connecting through a telephone/telecommunications network. If the customer is using regular analog phone lines—historically the most common method and still the most common means for home and small office customers—the customer's computer is then connected to the phone line with a modem, a device that converts between digital computer signals and analog phone signals. Business customers are increasingly using digital phone lines, such as ISDN, for online service access, because they enable higher speed and quality of data transfer. Customers access a central data bank of information by calling a local, or sometimes long-distance, telephone number, and information is then transferred to the user over the phone lines. Online services can offer local dial-up numbers throughout the country to a faraway data bank by making use of any one of various data communications networks. An alternative way to connect to the online service's computer is via the Internet, especially the Web. If a customer's organization has a host computer directly on the Internet, then its users can connect to the Internet through a local area network, and no modems are needed.

Online services, which manage the databases, may charge the customer a flat monthly rate for unlimited access to the data bank. In other cases, customers pay according to the length of time they access the databases, the amount of information that they access and print, and/or the type of information that they use. Professional online services may charge as much as $300 per hour to access certain databases—and additional fees for printing records—because collecting timely information, paying copyright royalties, providing telecommunication connections, and supporting sophisticated data storage equipment generate immense overhead. Customers who access large amounts of tax and legal information may pay tens of thousands of dollars per month in online charges. In comparison to business information services, personal systems are typically inexpensive because the data is less costly, and the volume of users in the market is large.

The advantage that online systems have over other forms of electronic information services is timeliness. The medium is especially appropriate for customers who require up-to-the-minute information. Database managers can continually update information related to stock quotes and other financial data, legal rulings and court proceedings, sporting events, world news, and other timely matters. Online systems are also advantageous because they allow access to massive amounts of information that is cumbersome for customers to access via print or other media. In fact, the most popular online services offer simultaneous searching of multiple databases.

Background and Development

The electronic information services industry was born during the post-World War II information explosion. The advent of computers during this period formed the basis for channeling large amounts of data to scientists, engineers, businesses, and government agencies. Government investment in new information technologies in the 1950s and 1960s was supplemented by increased private sector spending on research and higher education. The result was that, for the first time, skilled professionals could create, store, and quickly access large amounts of data.

The purpose of the earliest retrieval systems was simply to store and print information—mostly for technical endeavors. As the number and size of the databases grew, however, systems engineers began to focus on searching capabilities that could filter out unneeded data. Eventually, users were able to type commands into a computer that would search and display information containing specific keywords or phrases.

The first computerized bibliographic databases stemmed from the federal government's need for the efficient application of research dollars and the desire to eliminate duplicate analyses. Some of the more popular databases developed in this period included MEDLINE and ERIC. The government also subsidized nonprofit efforts, such as the American Chemical Society's Chemical Abstracts database.

In addition to supporting nonprofit services, government investment in the 1960s initiated many of the private information retrieval services that dominated the market in the 1980s and early 1990s. For instance, Dialog sprung from a venture between the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and Lockheed Corporation called Project RECON. ORBIT Online was developed as a result of System Development Corporation's work with the National Library of Medicine. Industry giant Mead Data Central (now called LexisNexis) got its start from seed money provided by U.S. Air Force projects.

The federal government also played a vital role in developing telecommunications networks that made online services possible. Networks that essentially provided affordable access for database online users through local telephone lines stemmed from Department of Defense efforts. The network of all networks, the Internet, also began as a Department of Defense project.

As more efficient telecommunications networks arose, and computer technology advanced in the late 1960s and 1970s, the market for online information services began to proliferate. Companies and libraries were increasingly relying on technical and legal information to provide a competitive edge in the marketplace or to make their research efforts more efficient. Furthermore, many users were finding electronic information access to be an important tool for increasing productivity.

As electronic markets began to grow, many publishing houses began to experiment with electronic publishing as a means of delivering their information. H. W. Wilson and Company, for instance, began offering access to Wilson indexes and abstracts online through WILSONLINE. Likewise, McGraw-Hill and other periodical publishers began offering their publications online. One of the greatest commercial uses of electronic information retrieval was for legal publications.

By the end of the 1970s, the emerging information retrieval industry was beginning to establish itself in many sectors of government, academia, and industry. Because of technical limitations, however, retrieval systems remained extremely costly. Furthermore, most systems were complicated and required professional research skills for effective use. As a result, estimated industry revenues were still well under $500 million by 1980.

Technological breakthroughs in personal computer and data storage devices fueled rapid industry growth through the 1980s and early 1990s. At the same time that microcomputers were becoming faster and less expensive, users were becoming accustomed to working with modems, networks, and other communications devices, allowing large numbers of people to gain access to reservoirs of data. For the first time, information retrieval companies were able to expand their services to the enduser, or the person that would actually use the information, rather than professional researchers.

As end-users increasingly became the market for information providers, companies began to emphasize user-friendly system interfaces that allowed easier data searching and access, such as providing menus instead of requiring the user to memorize arcane commands. Firms were also quick to take advantage of retrieval technologies. For instance, online services were able to make use of faster modem communication speeds, including highspeed, always-on network connections that are now common in businesses and, increasingly, in homes.

As new markets emerged, companies began to expand their offerings. Online information "supermarkets" such as Dialog evolved, where users could access hundreds of specialized databases covering thousands of publications. Information "boutiques" that offered simultaneous online access to multiple databases and services for one particular industry or profession also resulted. Individual niche services flourished as well. Between 1987 and 1992 the number of electronic databases available in the industry leapt nearly 300 percent, from 3,369 to more than 10,000.

In the late 1980s, the emergence of CD-ROM technology, for storing and accessing large amounts of data by a personal computer, appeared as a competitive threat to online aggregators. Many database publishers who had previously been distributing their electronic databases exclusively through online services began to publish and distribute that same data themselves on CD-ROM. By the early 1990s, however, it became clear that the information market was growing fast enough to accommodate both online and CD-ROM media, and that the two could exist side by side serving different customer needs.

Legislative issues related to copyright infringement came to the forefront of the industry during the 1990s. By 1996 the U.S. Congress debated whether online services should be held fully responsible for copyright infringement by their customers, and infringement suits based on online content were already circulating in the U.S. court system. To fulfill copyright law obligations, online services were required to monitor the distribution and customer access of each copyrighted database record to ensure that proper royalty fees were paid. Thus, the computer systems of online services automatically tallied how many times a specific record was accessed to determine how great the licensing fees should be that were paid to the database producer. Database producers, in turn, paid royalty fees based on this tally information to the original publishers.

For the fairest, most accurate payment of royalties, end-user customers also were charged for each record accessed, sometimes at a different rate for different kinds of records. This system worked well for certain professional and business customers, but the home consumer market preferred flat-fee pricing. Through careful historical analysis of database access statistics, database producers and online services were in many cases able to derive revenue projections that enabled them to begin charging flat fees for customers and still honor royalty agreements.

During the late 1990s and early 2000s, the proliferation of free information on the Internet put severe pressures on old-style subscription services, and some organizations cracked under the strain. Dialog, one of the oldest and most revered subscription databases for professionals, was one casualty. In 1997 the troubled service was purchased from Knight Ridder, a newspaper publisher, by an obscure British concern known as Market Analysis Information Database (MAID). Renamed Dialog Corporation plc, the service continued to flounder with flat revenues and fleeing customers. In a controversial move, the company ratcheted up its search fees drastically, when it learned many users were identifying information sources (newspapers, periodicals) with its powerful search engine but then retrieving the articles more cheaply from the sources' Web sites. This alienated more users. Although the company managed to turn a slim profit in 1998, it was strapped with debt and faced an uncertain market. Finally, in 2000 the Dialog service and trade name was sold to Thomson Corp. of Canada.

Demand for information services grew rapidly in the 1990s. Based on the Census Bureau's revenue estimates, the industry grew at an average of nearly 18 percent a year between 1992 and 1998, when the industry took in $12.3 billion in sales. That growth was heavily weighted toward the end of the period, when industry sales surged 30 percent or more each year.

Current Conditions

Market Conditions. In 2000, according to Census Bureau figures, the information retrieval industry took in $27.7 billion in sales. The total market for electronic information services is tricky to gauge, however, because it depends on how they are defined. Private-sector estimates are usually quite a bit higher. For example, Veronis Suhler Stevenson, a communications market research firm, estimated that the market for business information services alone reached $28.3 billion in 2001.

Although the business information market is but one industry subsector, it is an important one, along with the library market. By the early 2000s, the information retrieval industry was recovering from a challenging economic climate, which had led to lower levels of business and library spending. The negative downturn on the corporate side is evident in the findings of the Veronis Suhler Stevenson Communications Industry Report , released in late 2002. The report found that adjusted revenues for more than 70 of the industry's major publicly traded organizations—including Reed Elsevier, Reuters, and Thomson—increased almost 8 percent in 2001. This was much lower than the compound annual growth rate of more than 11 percent that these firms achieved between 1997 and 2001.

A separate publication, the Veronis Suhler Stevenson Communications Industry Forecast , indicated that businesses reduced their spending on information services by 0.3 percent in 2001. The forecast indicated that some segments, especially financial and economic information, achieved less significant losses than other business information segments. It predicted that conditions would improve nearly 6 percent in 2002 and then grow to more than $65 billion by 2006, fueled by a compound annual growth rate of nearly 7 percent.

The Internet's Impact. In many ways the Internet has turned the traditional information retrieval business model on its head. In a few short years, consumer-oriented indexes/search engines like Yahoo! provided competition for subscription-based services. Although this was challenging for information retrieval companies, it does not spell doom for traditional fee-based providers. According to an estimate by LexisNexis, in 2000 the Web contained just 40 million unique documents, compared to LexisNexis' 2.5 billion documents. For professional researchers, the power of such retrieval systems also far exceeds that of a Web search engine, allowing more versatile search options and often more efficient indexing and classification. A database like LexisNexis or Dialog is also usually more stable than many Web pages, an important feature for historical research.

As of 2003 many researchers believed there was still a vital need for both free and low-end subscription services over the Internet, as well as proprietary database systems, whether accessed through the Web or other means. The main problems for vendors of traditional services will be pricing and market share, as some of their business is lost or relocated because of newer Internet sources. In the early 2000s, information retrieval companies were taking a number of measures to deliver more value to end-users in the professional and consumer sectors, and provide them with content that could not be obtained freely on the Internet. For example, most were rolling out new products for targeted audiences like public relations professionals, lawyers, students, and genealogists. Some were adding high-quality content from peer-reviewed academic journals. Still other companies, including ProQuest and the Gale Group, were in the process of digitizing old books and news articles, providing users with searchable historical content (text and images) dating back as far as the early 1700s.

Legislation and Legal Issues. The main type of legislation that affects the information services industry is copyright law. Most of the information contained in databases distributed by online services is copyrighted, yet because it is in electronic form, it can be easily reproduced. Online services have not felt any need to challenge existing copyright law, but challenges from others have touched their industry. Original authors of published articles and artists of creative works have sued database producers and vendors for electronically distributing their articles without permission.

Copyright-related issues were making waves in the industry in 2002 and 2003. At that time, a number of magazine and newspaper publishers, including news giant Gannett, were removing literally millions of freelance-written articles from electronic databases. This was happening in the wake of Tasini v New York Times , a U.S. Supreme Court decision that found that electronic rights to articles default to authors and not publishers. This had the greatest impact on digital content published prior to 1999. After that year, most publications required freelance writers to consent to the electronic publication of their articles. Some publications were removing all of their electronic content published before 1999, rather than taking the time to selectively identify and remove individual articles, according to Library Journal.

Industry Leaders

General Professional Database Services. The Thomson Corp., Toronto, Canada, is parent to scores of general and industry-specific information retrieval services and is a major information provider worldwide. One of its main offerings is a general-purpose database called Dialog. The Dialog service was the pioneer in online retrieval services when it was founded in 1972. It was sold in 1988 for $353 million by its parent, Lockheed Corp., to the newspaper publishing and news service company Knight Ridder Inc. Under Knight Ridder Information Services, Dialog was also linked in the mid-1990s with DataStar, a European information service. However, amid sluggish sales, Knight Ridder sold its information services in 1997 to U.K.-based Market Analysis Information Database (MAID) for a steep $420 million. The new company, called Dialog Corporation plc, failed to effect a turnaround; sales languished, as the company was slow to embrace the Internet paradigm. MAID sold Dialog to Thomson Corp. in 2000 for $275 million. In addition to Dialog, Thomson's other major electronic retrieval systems include Infotrac, a periodical index and full-text database provided by the Gale Group (publisher of this encyclopedia), and Westlaw, a legal database provided by the West Group. In 2001 Thomson recorded revenues of $7.2 billion.

The LexisNexis Group is a division of UK-based publishing company Reed Elsevier. In 2001 the information service recorded revenues of $1.9 billion. It is among the largest general-purpose databases for professionals. The company, founded in 1970 and based in Dayton, Ohio, was known as Mead Data Central, until its parent, the Mead Corporation, sold it to the European publishing joint venture Reed Elsevier plc in 1994. The company's services include Lexis and Nexis. Started in 1973, Lexis offers access to legal databases. Nexis is the largest news and business information service, which began in 1979. LexisNexis offers its information services electronically via dial-up or the World Wide Web, as well as in print and CD-ROM formats. The company's electronic solutions allow users to search more than three billion documents.

Business and Finance. Among the online services that serve specialized business markets, the largest companies are those that provide real-time securities and other financial information services. The largest companies, which have been in the business for some time, not only provide information services, but some also continue the practice of leasing proprietary computer terminals to access the information.

Reuters Group PLC of London is a major player in financial and news information services. It has long been the biggest provider of financial news to businesses. By the early 2000s, the company had bolstered its position by acquiring competitor Bridge Information Systems, which in the late 1990s was one of the top three financial information vendors. The company also operates a massive global news wire and news gathering business, and since 1999 it has run an information retrieval joint venture with Dow Jones Interactive called Factiva (formerly Dow Jones Reuters Business Interactive) that features a full-text newspaper and journal database. In 2001 the Reuters Group recorded approximately $5.7 billion in revenue.

The other leading competitor is Bloomberg L.P. of New York. Like Reuters, it provides an extensive line of financial and news information products, including information terminal service to the financial industry. Bloomberg also has media and publishing ventures. The company's revenue in 2001 was estimated at $2.6 billion, and it has more than 160,000 information terminals installed worldwide.

Internet Search Engines. Web-based universal search engines have had profound impact on the rest of the information retrieval business. Unlike other services, they rely on advertising almost exclusively for revenue.

Yahoo! Inc. is the world's largest Web search engine based on number of users. From its inception Yahoo! has taken a value-added approach to collecting Web site information: it classifies all sites in a hierarchy for ease of searching. While this has meant that Yahoo! does not always list as many sites as competing search engines, users have been pleased with its approach. In 2002 Yahoo! was the Internet's most widely used search engine. The company's 2001 revenues totaled $717.4 million. Its earnings were fueled by advertising and services like Yahoo! Auctions and Yahoo! Bill Pay. In addition to acquiring HotJobs in late 2001, Yahoo! entered the traditional information retrieval market the following year, when it launched the Premium Document Search service. This offering provided users with access to more than 70 million full-text documents from more than 7,000 different sources. However, the service was short-lived, and by early 2003 it had been discontinued. At that time, Yahoo! continued to offer access to articles from the New York Times , as well as investment-related information through its Yahoo! Finance service.

Terra Lycos, S.A., was formed in 2000 when the leading independent Web search engine Lycos was acquired by Telefonica, a Spanish telecommunications firm. By 2003 the company had emerged as the world's largest Internet network. In late 2002 it launched a new version of the popular search engine HotBot. According to the company, the new HotBot enabled users to search four of the leading Internet search engines—FAST, Google, Inktomi, and Teoma SM—from one convenient interface. In 2001 Terra Lycos recorded sales of approximately $618 million.

Workforce

According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics' 2002-2003 Career Guide to Industries , the information retrieval industry has achieved strong growth since the late 1980s. Between 1990 and 2000, this growth led to the creation of some 196,000 jobs. Positions in the information retrieval services industry include: computer programmers; system analysts; information processing and delivery professionals; sales representatives; management; clerical and office management; writers and editors; and research analysts.

Occupations that will likely experience the greatest growth in the next decade are related to computer programming and system development. Jobs for sales professionals in all computer and data processing fields are projected to grow at a healthy clip as well, while significant increases in the number of writers, editors, and technical writers employed in the industry are also anticipated.

America and the World

The U.S. electronic information retrieval industry is the largest and most advanced of any nation in the world. It is also acknowledged by foreign markets as the provider of the most comprehensive and highest quality information services. Acceptance of the English language as the standard for information services has helped U.S. companies compete abroad. As a result of these factors, U.S. firms have found major growth opportunities in overseas information markets. The fact that online services specialize in transferring data over long distances has made the expansion into international markets a logical step.

The largest market for online services outside of the United States is Western Europe. Both the major U.S. business and consumer online services have subscribers in Europe. The liberalization and privatization of telecommunications services in Europe was also expected to lower the telecom rates paid by businesses and consumers, and consequently encourage the use of online services. The Asia/Pacific region, and Japan in particular, is another fast growing market. Strong opportunities for growth also exist in Latin America and Eastern Europe. Foreign investors from all countries are seeking information about these markets, and these countries and regions will all demand increasing amounts of business, legal, and financial information about the United States and other developed markets.

Another aspect of the globalization of the online services industry is not merely the export of the services, but also the internationalization of the databases being offered. U.S. database vendors are increasingly contracting database providers in Europe and Japan to provide the content for databases on their respective industries, which in turn are offered back to the European and Japanese markets in addition to the U.S. market. For example, NEXIS began offering BizEkon, a Russian business directory, and Comline Corporate Directory, which contains profiles of Japanese firms. DataTimes, a full-text online newspaper service, started delivering "China Daily" and several other Chinese publications. Similarly, U.S. database producers are licensing their databases to foreign database vendors for distribution abroad.

Research and Technology

The electronic information retrieval industry is heavily influenced by technological advances and is, in effect, a corollary of recent advances in computer and telecommunications technology.

Developments in the computer industry have made more powerful computers and database management software available at lower costs. This has permitted online services to expand their database offerings without technical limitations and has lowered the entry barrier to smaller companies to get into the business of online services.

Computer software developments have led to the growing use of graphical user interfaces for accessing online services. The software then permits users to organize the data on their own computer hard drives without spending additional costly time being connected to the online service. The most recent trends in software have made access to external data appear as a seamless part of working on one's own computer desktop. This is particularly the case for computer users whose computers are directly linked to the Internet through an organization's local area network. Lotus Notes groupware software and Microsoft Office software offer features of integrating online accessed data with desktop applications.

The development of telecommunications technologies are of particular importance to online services, which rely upon phone lines to transmit data to their customers. Even though modems may enable data transmission speeds of up to 433,600 bps, whether such speeds are actually attained depends on the bandwidth of phone lines—and usually the optimal speeds cannot be reached. While telephone networks are being improved with fiberoptic lines, the capabilities of a phone line are only as good as its weakest link, typically the final connection to the individual office or residence. Businesses are investing in their own high-bandwidth dedicated lines, leased lines, and wide-area networks. Residences, too, now have the opportunity to use high-bandwidth lines for additional charges. Wireless communications technologies, such as cellular modems for portable computers, allow users to access online services in remote locations. By the early 2000s, direct broadcast satellites were another way that business and consumer audiences were gaining high-speed access to the Internet.

Finally, the combined developments in computer hardware, software, and telecommunications services are enabling the transmission of more complex kinds of data through online services. The rise of broadband Internet connections and advancements in data compression technologies have enabled transmission of full-motion video and accompanied sound through online services. At this point the distinction between online information services and interactive cable television broadcasters becomes blurred. The difference may merely depend on whether the data is defined as information or entertainment, or whether it is viewed through a computer monitor or television screen.

Further Reading

"Business Information Market Expands." Online , March 1999.

Davis, Joel, et al. "Dutch Giant Sinks Teeth into Web." Editor & Publisher , 28 February 2000.

Lubove, Seth. "Dial-a-Mess." Forbes , 24 January 2000.

Pemberton, Jeff. "An Industry Analysis with Outsell Inc." Online , July-August 1999.

Tenopir, Carol. "Getting What You Pay For?" Library Journal , 1 February 2000.

——. "Oldies but Goodies." Library Journal , 1 November 2002.

——. "Trends from the Industry Perspective." Library Journal , 1 June 2002.

——. "Unlikely Partnerships." Library Journal , July 1999.

Tenopir, Carol, and Jeff Barry. "Data Dealers Forging Links." Library Journal , 15 May 1999.

Tenopir, Carol; Gayle Baker; and William Robinson. "The Database Universe: More Gateways To Other Systems and More Full Text, Better Indexing, and Customized Packages Respond to Librarians' Demands. (Database Marketplace 2002)." Library Journal , 15 May 2002.

U.S. Census Bureau. Service Annual Survey: 1998. Washington, D.C.: 2000. Available from http://www.census.gov .

——. Service Annual Survey: 2000. Washington, D.C.: 2000. Available from http://www.census.gov .

U.S. Department of Labor. "Computer and Data Processing Services." Career Guide to Industries 2002-03 Edition. Available from http://www.bls.gov .

——. Occupational Outlook Handbook, 2000-01 Edition. Washington, D.C.: GPO, 2000. Available from http://www.bls.gov .

Veronis, Suhler & Associates. "Business Information Services." Communications Industry Report. New York, 1999. Available from http://www.veronissuhler.com .

Veronis Suhler Stevenson. Veronis Suhler Stevenson Communications Industry Forecast. New York, 2002. Available from http://www.veronissuhler.com .

——. Veronis Suhler Stevenson Communications Industry Report. New York, 2002. Available from http://www.veronissuhler.com .



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