>> Ellen Terrell: My name is Ellen Terrell and I've been a reference librarian here at the library for almost 20 years, about a month, two months shy of it thereabouts, and this is a set that has featured prominently in my sort of like learning how to do research on older companies here at the library, and we are in the process of beginning to digitize it. Obviously, we have digitized some, and I would like to share this set as much as possible. It's very useful for a bunch of -- several different types of research. So this is the purpose of this presentation. Our goal for this presentation is just to include some information about the set, for people that are unfamiliar with it, so show you a little bit of what's actually in it, give you a few little tips on using the set based on sort of how it's organized sort of in terms of a physical thing but also how we have digitized it. To start, wanted to go over a little bit about the company itself. There is a bit more information about the history of the company here and some other details and nuggets of information that you can read later, but just to give you sort of like a brief overview, R.G. Dun Company, which is now Dun and Bradstreet, has been a credit reporting agency since the middle of the 19th century and they've provided ratings on companies or enterprises financial strength and ability to pay back their debts. They publish these quarterly public ratings on merchants, manufacturers, and traders in the U.S. and Canada. The companies had several different names during its lifetime, so you'll sometimes see Mercantile Agency, R.G. Dun and Company. Sometimes it'll just be called, in more recent times, Reference Book of American Business, or Reference Book, that kind of thing. So the information in them was to facilitate people doing business with others, particularly if they weren't necessarily, say, in the same town or even in the same state. There is a bit of information either about the set or some other helpful information under the "Expert Resources" there on the left. Eventually, when this recording is live on the internet, we will put it here as well. So the project status here is we are digitizing what we have, at least at this point, prior to 1924. This beginning collection which covers just 1900 to 1924 was pulled from our microfiche set. We are currently going backwards, or starting from the beginning and digitizing from our print volumes. That will take a while because these sets are really large, but we wanted to get this set up and running as soon as possible because this is almost 25 years' worth of this title, which is sort of like a really good amount to be using. Just a few things on this actual page here. If you wanted to look at any one of these, you can click on it and it will open to the page. To get into the collection, you will click on "Collection Items" and you will just see the listing here. The facets over on the left can sort of like help you move around if you're sort of looking to sort of drill down into something in particular. So if you click on 1900, you'll see, and go from here. So these are just a few of those sort of like intro things to note. Other things are going to be about sort of like working with a digitized -- how we digitized it. The first thing I want to start off with is maps, which may not seem really obvious for this set, but if your idea is -- if people who are going to be looking at this might be traveling salesman, would be a very important thing to note. This particular map on New Jersey is mostly about the railway lines, which obviously is important to people traveling by rail to other places either as a salesman or you're going to go look at somebody's product. Sometimes these charts do include fare and distance information, but that sort of changes over the time -- over time of this set, which is a sort of a common theme with this set. In the -- oh, how do you get there? That's interesting. Okay, that's not where I meant to be. Oh, sorry, I was on the wrong page. And that's what I was afraid would happen. Okay, that's where I need it to be. So you will see here is a large view of New Jersey and it will have, you know, obviously, all the little places. What's really nice is, is that you will be able to see the places next to the state as well. So obviously, it would be not uncommon for people to be traveling to Philadelphia if they're in lower Pennsylvania -- or lower New Jersey as well. Some states do not have their own maps. Think in terms of the small New England states and the District of Columbia, which is also listed with Maryland. The territories are included, but they are in -- they're usually alphabetical, or sort of like their alphabetical location within the state listing, A to Z listing. At the beginning of each state's presentation, they usually have the list of counties and county seats with geographical locations and branches of the agency itself and population information. The next thing I wanted to go into was the key and the two ratings. This is sort of getting into the meat of what the actual set did. The first part of it, there are two parts to sort of like a company's information other than the name, is the pecuniary strength and the general credit rating. You can see that they do the pecuniary strength in ranges, so A double plus is over $1 million in strength, or in sales. The key, I should say, does change over time, so -- and every volume does not necessarily have a key for some reason. It might be our digitization or when it was turned into microfiche or how we bound them, if we bound them, so that you will just have to find a key on either side of the time period you're looking for, and, you know, if it hasn't changed, then it hasn't changed. We have created an index of all of the keys for the volumes that have been digitized, and Natalie is going to be putting that into the chat, so you can, you know, more easily find the keys that you need when you're using the set. The last part of the sort of information about the company is sort of like what are the trades, which is sort of a little bit about the industry. They use these funny little symbols for different things, and eventually, once the Security Standard Industrial Classification Codes were used, those were included instead. Here is a sample page, and Natalie -- >> Natalie Burclaff: I'm doing a quick poll. >> Ellen Terrell: Quick poll. There we go. So guess the number of businesses in Kane, Illinois, in this particular year, which is 1904. I'll give that a second. >> Natalie Burclaff: Yeah, we have quite a few people. >> Ellen Terrell: Okay, well, I don't -- >> Natalie Burclaff: Are you going to give it away? >> Ellen Terrell: I don't want to give it away. If anybody wants to count, you can count, but I'm not going to give it away. >> Natalie Burclaff: There was 588 people in July of 1904. I'll close out the poll, and the majority picked correctly. >> Ellen Terrell: All right, yay. I guess that would make sense if it was, you know, if you're talking about New Orleans or something, but there is the listing for Kane. There are 28. As you can see, each business has the name and it has what it does and then it has the code for, you know, information after that. Interestingly enough, in the Kane, blacksmith is the biggest business with four. Grocery stores was the -- grocery stores and millineries were next, which was with three each. So there we go. There are a few businesses that sort of are generally not included, though at various points may have been included in those, were businesses like hairdressers, barbers, lawyers, doctors, schools, and that kind of thing. One interesting note is that while saloons were a category in the 1919 edition, after the 18th Amendment was passed, they disappeared from the directory listing. So just an interesting observation, and, of course, they had to take them out because, you know, that was an illegal business. As you can see from this Kane information or Kane listing, a lot of the businesses were named after the people who ran them, or the family who ran them. So for anybody who's doing genealogy, if you knew your grandparents, grandfather, your grandmother had a business, but you didn't know what it was, this would be a source that might be able to provide you a little of information about that as well as sort of like the state of their business, you know, were they good, you know, was it a business that was making a lot of money, were they a little bit maybe smaller, who were their competitors in town if they were one of the three milliners in town. So it'll add a little bit of interest to your genealogy research. Also, businesses here don't have names other than as the business name except when it comes to banking. Usually, if your grandparent worked in a bank, their names will be listed. I'll show you that in a little bit. It's actually on the next page. So this is about business names and not about people who sort of like worked for the business. And speaking of banks, there are each -- Dun and Bradstreet added bank listings at a point in its history. Where they put that listing changed over time. In the beginning, it was in the back of the set with, for a very short time, the status of fire insurance companies list. Eventually, it moved and it was sort of placed with all of the businesses in the state, and as you can see here, here's a name under the National Bank of Wilmington and Brandywine. There's a George S. Capelle, who I guess was the principal, and then there's the H.G. Banning for the National Bank of Delaware as well, and it tells you a little bit about the bank. Obviously, if you were dealing with people in other states, you'd want to know sort of how to get money to and from each other. Another piece of information that is in these sets, though it wasn't always in this set, was the abstract of collections and assignment laws. Obviously, if you're going to be doing business with others in other states, you want to know about sort of like contracts, whether you can do certain types of business, how, if you're chasing some debt, what the law is. It's obviously not a complete, you know, state law, but it is probably very helpful for people to understand where they might stand should they need that information. Canada was also included. The information is listed by province and it is pretty much what you would expect for any of the individual states in the U.S. There's bigger maps. There's this small map right here in Ontario with the railroads. They've got the information about the offices and the geographical locations and county seats. There's Allandale and Simcoe and there are the businesses and the ratings. That didn't change just for the Canadian companies. Moving on to sort of like -- sort of like how to move through this set electronically, there are a few things to note right here. There are a -- generally speaking, each volume has two parts, so there will be part one for July of 1904 and part two for July of 1904. There are a few where there are three, but consistently, or most generally, it's two volumes, or two files per volume. This is -- what you're seeing here is the grid view, and you will see, you know, you can get some clues because there's a, you know, a bit of a thumbnail for each one. Under each one, you can also see a little bit of text, so if you are having to move from like a large state with a lot of entries, you would be able to go, "Oh, look, Choctaw," or other places will show up. The map for the state will be the first thing that you generally see once the maps are included. So that's a good way to help you understand where you are moving through the set. The states -- the listing is alphabetical by state for the most part. However, in the early years, it started off with New York City and then it was alphabetical by state. If you are wanting to move, obviously, you can see there are quite a few files here, 572, and if you're not looking for any of the states that are at the beginning of the alphabet, you can change it to the gallery view and -- did I do that? Guess it worked. And then you can also go down here and change the results per page and it can help you get through sort of going through it much faster than you had. Again, one little note again is the D.C. -- or some states don't have their own maps. D.C. is usually with Maryland, or is frequently with Maryland, and sometimes Delaware is also included, and then like New Hampshire and Vermont also share maps. So sometimes the map as a signal to the beginning of the state entry is not always exact. You can search this set. It is OCR, so sometimes it's not perfect, and it is better for if you're searching for something very specific. Think like my name, "Terrell," or something more specific, and not say "Washington" or "Smith." So if it's like "Pepsi" or if it's "Terrell," you're more likely to get material. You just have to make sure that up in the box it says "this collection" or you'll be searching, like, the library's website, and when you click on it, you'll get your results and you can facet over here as well if you're interested in only looking in one particular volume. If you want to know where -- the times that that word hit, right here in the entry you will see it says "view with search results" and it says that there are 44 pages. And if this moves forward like it should -- did I click on it? Yeah, it will show you the results in highlighted pink. This is why we don't always like to do things live. There we go. And then you could go into it, obviously, if that works. There we go. So in this case, it's in Texas, and there is a Charles J. Terrell and a Terrell Bottling Company and a Terrell Cotton Oil and Terrell Electric Light. So that's how you can search for it. I should say at this point that sometimes working with this set and with OCR can be an exercise in patience, so don't give up when you're using this set. We decided to go for a little bit of an example. We decided to go with looking at Detroit specifically. We picked 1922, which was not long after the Model A was introduced. As you can see here, here's the beginning entry for the Detroit office, or for the Detroit entries. There is the population. It'll even tell you where the map is, and if you, for some reason, were interested in where the R.G. Dun office, R.G. Dun and Co.'s office was, it usually gives that at the beginning of it as well. Going to the Ford entry, or the area where the Ford is, you can -- Ford Company is, you can see it here, right here. It's got the little C with the dot in the middle of it which stood for "automobiles" as well as auto supplies, etc. It also included garages and car wheels. Engines, on the other hand, are a different letter. You can see Ford Electric right here, and then carriages are still included at this point and they are indicated with an S. Don't see any on this little snip right here. There are several businesses here with that same symbol as the Ford. There is the Forest Tire and Battery, the Foreman Motor Sales, so it obviously includes car dealers as well, R.S. Fontaine, and Fred's Accessories, and obviously there are garages as well. So you will see there's Ford here. There's the Fontaine. Here's Eugene Fresh, and Fred's Accessories. Just as an FYI, if you were interested, the Ford Motor Company had a double A rating, which was over a million dollars in sales that year, and their credit rating was A1, which means it was pretty high, which I guess would be good. This is the key for that year, so you can see what was going on in that particular year in terms of sort of all of the businesses. And moving on, I wanted to go spend a few seconds, a few -- sort of go over the key just a little bit. The key does change over time. This is 1903. We picked 1903 and 1922. In 1903, it includes electrical supplies, engines, and car wheels. Doctors and watchmakers at this time we're actually included. Let's see, there's the dot, and then, however, by 1922, things had actually changed. Let me move that up a little. Carriages and wagon-makers and wheelwrights were still included, but doctors and watchmakers weren't. Watchmakers were part of jewelers. Now there are some new industries, which would include automobiles, auto supplies, garages, motorcycles, car wheels, car engines, telephones, and the like, but otherwise, some industries got a little bit more specialized. That included things with better refrigeration, which was its own category, so it included things like produce, vegetable, fruit, butter, cheese, creameries, and eggs. So it's also a good way to sort of get a sense of the changing nature of sort of like the industries that were becoming more popular or were getting to the point where they needed their own category. So that is the basic presentation for this and I'm hoping there are some questions. We will get as much as we can. So Natalie, is there anything in particular? >> Natalie Burclaff: So there's a few questions, and I'm just going to put, in case we don't get to all the questions, I'm putting the link to our Ask a Librarian Forum, which we're always happy to spend more time on more in-depth questions. One question we have is an acknowledgment that this might be a difficult question to answer, but how accurate do we think the information is? So for example, did Dun and Bradstreet list like 90% of the businesses in town? Is there a way to know if this is an exhaustive list? >> Ellen Terrell: I would gather -- I would say that in the beginning of the set, prior to this part that's been digitized, it may -- it's a little less exhaustive in the sense of some states weren't included yet. They had to find somebody to actually do the work. As for exhaustive, I'm going to guess that there are probably businesses that weren't included. I would say in probably smaller towns, it's probably more exhaustive, potentially, for no other reason than there's just fewer businesses that have to be sort of found and the person doing it was either somebody in town, frequently a lawyer or a banker, who would understand some of this stuff a little bit better. Cities, there may have been some things that aren't -- it may not be exhaustive, but I don't know that I've ever seen any sense of whether or not it's exhaustive. I'd say it's probably most, even if it's not every. >> Natalie Burclaff: A question about, like where did the doctors go? >> Ellen Terrell: I think the doctors just weren't included because they -- since a lot of this set was about doing business with businesses out of state, that maybe it was more about the other businesses wanting to know whether the doctor would pay their bill as opposed to necessarily the other way around. I'm not sure. They just -- I probably have to do research, but sometimes Dun's wasn't always -- isn't always very good about explaining, like, not just when they drop something, but sort of like maybe why they don't include it without reading the explanation that might be at the beginning of the set that might explain that. So I'd have to go back and look at that. >> Natalie Burclaff: And then another question that they said, sorry, they came in a little bit late, but are the trades listed in the key sort of like a precursor to NAICS, or is it something else? >> Ellen Terrell: I sort of use it that way, though they clearly call it "trades," which on some level makes it -- makes me feel more of like it's sort of like the processes, which I know is sort of like a NAICS -- the difference between NAICS and SICs, so I would say somewhat close, but clearly, they're sort of like wider groupings. But yeah, I would say it's close, but clearly, they feel the need to, when they put a written description in the business as well, so obviously, for the car dealership or for the automobile example, there were a bunch of different business types that were given the same trades symbol. So sort of. >> Natalie Burclaff: Then another question just asking for any tips for searching big cities like Chicago. >> Ellen Terrell: Oh, boy. I don't think -- we can search the collection. I don't know that you can search a particular place. The businesses are just listed A to Z once you get into sort of like a city-town's, like, listing, so there's -- I guess it sort of depends on what you're looking to do with it. >> Natalie Burclaff: You could also maybe -- because these, in addition to like searching, you can download them, so you might want to try downloading them as XML files or PDFs and then doing like a more limited control-F within Chicago, but again, like Ellen mentioned, OCR was not -- is not perfect, especially with all the symbols. It has a hard time reading the text perfectly. So that might be a way to limit, to just download the pages that contain "Chicago" and then do a search, but you would have to do that for each year unless you were limited to year, would be one suggestion. Someone asked, "Could you do a search for the Code Compiling Company, 15 Whitehall Street, New York, for 1921?" Like, how would you narrow the search down from everything? >> Ellen Terrell: Let me go back to where the search is. >> Natalie Burclaff: I can give you the name of the . . . >> Ellen Terrell: Okay, I wanted to go back to that page. >> Natalie Burclaff: So it's the Code Compiling Company. >> Ellen Terrell: Okay, I would say leave -- though, interestingly, it pops up this way. I would leave the word "company" and "manufacturing" and that kind of thing out for no other reason than it's either frequently left off, oops, or it is -- this is not what I was expecting to see, or it's abbreviated and you don't know necessarily how it is actually abbreviated. >> Natalie Burclaff: 1921 was the year they were looking for. >> Ellen Terrell: Okay. >> Natalie Burclaff: And then I think we have to change to list view maybe. What's funny, that I went to gallery view. >> Ellen Terrell: Yeah. That is the problem with this set. It's interesting, that's not -- okay, there's only one page where that came up, so we will see if that actually worked or not. >> Natalie Burclaff: While it's thinking, found some other questions. What was the source of the information that was used to rate the company? >> Ellen Terrell: Typically, I think they went and masked the company. Like I said, I think many of the people who were gathering the information were lawyers or bankers. I know from my experience using other sets that there is a directory set that is -- the title is "The List" -- it's basically, "The List of Bankers and Lawyers." So that seems to have been a sort of, like, clue that it -- these were the same people who are sort of like together in terms of a directory were the people who were gathering it, so they may have had other information. I don't think that is actually a result that we wanted. I'm not sure what's going on. >> Natalie Burclaff: It's not coming back or pulling it. In this case, you might have to browse, like if you knew they were in New York in 1921, you might just have to pull up the 1921 by New York City and look alphabetically. >> Ellen Terrell: Yeah, and when you view the five page -- when you're reviewing the pages with the results, it's not always going to be easy necessarily to find out what state it's actually being listed in. So compiling -- this one looks like it's actually a company and not part of the code list. So this is actually in Camden, New Jersey, and it is not what I expected it to be. So this is the tricky bit with OCR. I have a feeling it does not like more than one word in terms of a search. That might have been a problem. I actually got better hits when I just chose "compiling" as opposed to choosing "code." So that is just sort of like one of the tricks with this set, so . . . >> Natalie Burclaff: One comment is that small town Alabama in the 1870s at Harvard's collection seemed exhaustive, but maybe not for African Americans. >> Ellen Terrell: Oh, yeah. See, unfortunately, with the Dun's set, that you can't -- you can guess that most of these businesses are probably going to be white owners. There's no real way of telling, at least from this set, because as far as I have ever seen, they don't make note of that. And I have not seen anything that indicates that they don't rate African American businesses, though I would suspect if it is going to miss any, that it is going to potentially miss some African American businesses because, depending on the type of business it is, they may not be -- they may not be doing stuff and operating things in a way that leaves the same paper trail as sort of a more developed, established white business would be for varying reasons, but also -- >> Natalie Burclaff: And if people weren't interested in checking credits for black-owned businesses at the time, they might have excluded them as well. >> Ellen Terrell: Yeah. So there are a couple of reasons. Unfortunately, I can't -- I mean, I sort of have to know a business that was owned by African Americans and then go and look in the directory to see if it was, you know, and not use this set for trying to find them. >> Natalie Burclaff: Right, and you can -- there are directories of black-owned businesses from some of these time periods that is actually digitized by HathiTrust or other places, so I think that would be a really interesting study, is to compare the two directories. Someone else asked, "Given these directories were manually researched and compiled, they could not be up-to-the-minute current. Any ideas of the timeline -- lag time was, if the entries from 1904 directory, does that indicate that the info is as recent as 1903 or 1902, would be helpful for genealogy." >> Ellen Terrell: I have not seen anything indicating how long it took for them to get the material in the title. It was published multiple times a year, so the difference between the one that came out in the first part of the year versus the one that came out at the end. I use it sort of like more as a rough approximation of dates. I'm definitely not an exact. I would guess that there were -- it was probably a couple of months behind just because it was a big undertaking with a lot of businesses, but I haven't seen anything that said, oh, this stuff is, you know, x amount of time, and some places may not have been as behind as others. I don't -- haven't seen anything. >> Natalie Burclaff: Question I do want to get to is that -- a question that's helpful. Are digitized volumes only available in the Library of Congress, or can we use this from any computer or smartphone? >> Ellen Terrell: You can use this from any computer. >> Natalie Burclaff: Yeah, you can be anywhere, in California, so you can go to this after our presentation, or maybe you're already on it, but you can do all this from home. You do not have to be here. >> Ellen Terrell: Yes, this is why we're very excited about it because the library's collection is probably one of the more complete collections. This set was frequently -- this set was generally least, so when you got the new one, you sent the old one. I mean, you wouldn't want somebody to be looking at older, bad information, or older information, maybe not bad information. So, but we don't do that. You give it to us and we keep it, and so we have one of the more complete collections about it, and these sets are a little fragile. The paper's not great, and so digitizing them sort of will keep them around a little bit longer, but also will open up the number of people who can actually use them. Before, you actually did have to come to the library to use them. >> Natalie Burclaff: Another question that these -- this might not be able to help, was about finding out who designed a particular logo for a company like Heinz. >> Ellen Terrell: Yeah. It doesn't have names. So the one thing it may help, maybe not in this particular case, is I know that in terms of collecting and dating things, the format of the name can sort of help you go, well, it was before a certain time period and maybe after a certain time period. So in the case of Dun's, it's gone through several different name changes over its lifetime, and if you see something with it printed "Mercantile Company," well, you know, it's probably not after 1900 or something. So it only really sort of gives sort of rough date, or rough name changes, or rough date changes for names and not get anything more specific than that, unfortunately. >> Natalie Burclaff: Yeah, and if you're looking for a logo, business logo searches, the Patent and Trademark Office, you would want to search there for trademarks, and they should have some information when filing a trademark for a particular logo. That could be more helpful. This is not going to have, like Ellen said, who worked at a particular company or the details of that company, just that the company existed and its credit rating and financial strength. >> Ellen Terrell: Yeah, I will say that all city business directories will list people, but usually the top executives or the owner or what have you. This is adding information that you wouldn't get in a city directory. So a city directory would have a company name and it may have some officers in the location, but it wouldn't tell you how big the company was and it wouldn't tell you what their credit rating was. So you use this set with something else. Obviously, this set only has, in terms of location, the city, the city and the state. It wouldn't give the particular address, or if there was a phone number, the phone number, and it obviously doesn't give executives and things. So if you use both of those things together, you should get a little bit more information about what's going on with it. >> Natalie Burclaff: Yeah, I was even just thinking you could use this with like Sanborn maps and kind of map out where businesses were located and their financial strength and I wonder if you would see any trends with that. >> Ellen Terrell: And I know that -- I know the library is doing a Sanborn map webinar. I think it's this week. So if anybody wants to really nerd out and figure out how to -- you can take that one and then you'd be able to use both of these sets together to sort of like, you know, really go to town. >> Natalie Burclaff: But yeah, I think that's a good point, that you could also compare this with city directories from that time period, in a good sense. One last question is, "Can truncation be used in search?" >> Ellen Terrell: I have not done it, but I have to tell you, I don't like to use it when I'm searching things that are digitized like this. OCR, particularly with the paper that was used, especially during this time period, was very thin, so sometimes there is a hair bit of bleed behind the back of it, or the printing is not as clear as you might like, so sometimes A's and E's and S's can sort of seem a little light to the OCR, and I's and L's can sort of be alike. You can try it, but I don't know that -- I've been told if there was a truncation -- so it's not something that I would probably use just because I think I would get so many hits and I'd probably just get frustrated and go, "I'm not doing that." I typically don't use it for things like digitized newspapers anyway. >> Natalie Burclaff: And someone hopefully got the link from us for the Sanborn map orientation. >> Ellen Terrell: Okay, good. >> Natalie Burclaff: And this was just meant to be kind of a short overview session, so thank you all for staying a little bit longer than the 30 minutes we promised you, but if we didn't fully address your question or you have some more detailed information or have questions about doing company history research, I dropped the Ask a Librarian Forum online, so that gives us time to spend looking through some things and giving you some better research strategies, although Ellen's been doing a great job answering questions on the fly. And then also please take a survey about this class, so that link should just pop up once I close out of this, but it really helps us. It's the first time we've tried doing something that's a little short session about one particular collection item, so we are definitely interested in getting feedback about this and learning more about what brought you here, what we could improve. So I've put that link in chat, but it should also appear at the end of the session. >> Ellen Terrell: Yeah, one last thing. This is a set that I mentioned in our doing historical company research class. I'm not giving that one at least anytime soon, but that one has a previous session that has been recorded and is actually on the website, so if you want to see how this information might play with some of the other resources, for anybody who might be doing historical company research, you can go and listen to that one as well and there's a little bit of information about using this set or, you know, using this with other directories as well that might be helpful, so . . . >> Natalie Burclaff: And I just added the link for the historical company research. >> Ellen Terrell: Thank you. That just came up. I just forgot about that. >> Natalie Burclaff: Well, thanks, everyone, for joining us, and I will send out an email with the link to the recording when that's available, a reminder about the survey, and yeah, there were no -- there were no slides, so we were doing this live and the internet cooperated. >> Ellen Terrell: Thankfully. Thank you all for coming, and like I said, just put in -- like Natalie said, just put in questions if you have anything more specific that you want to know, and have fun. >> Natalie Burclaff: Yes. Thanks. >> Ellen Terrell: Thank you.