New Resource Available

a. Factiva

By Michael Oppenheim (Resource Liaison), UCLA

Factiva, from Dow Jones Reuters Business Interactive LLC, is a new Tier 2 acquisition negotiated on behalf of seven participating campuses: UC Berkeley, UC Davis, UC Irvine, UCLA, UC Merced, UC Riverside, and UC San Diego. Previously, Factiva has been available to the business school communities at UC Berkeley, UC Irvine, and UCLA; the combined purchasing power of the additional campuses now makes the database available campuswide at those institutions (Factiva has been available campuswide at UC Irvine for some years).

Factiva is a “mega” news and business information service, covering nearly 9,000 sources from 152 countries in 22 languages.  The search interface is available in nine languages: English (the default), traditional and simplified Chinese, Japanese, French, Spanish, German, Italian, and Russian.  Content ranges from trade and industry publications to general and financial newspapers, newswires, media transcripts, web sites, photographs, and more.

Factiva is updated continuously, with more than 900 sources available on or before the date of publication. Coverage dates vary; some titles extend back more than 25 years.  The majority of sources are available full-text, and are searchable by title, publication type, industry, geographic location, and language.

Factiva also provides stock performance data, company-to-industry comparative reports, market index reports, and business press releases. Close to 25,000 public and private company profiles are available; public companies may be screened by such criteria as industry, stock exchange, location, employees, price and share data, corporate performance, dividend and growth rate, valuation and liquidity ratios, and efficiency ratios.

The Celex database for the European Union is available via the Factiva “News Pages” tab; Celex includes EU directives, treaties, legislation, case law, and other documents.

Among the major domestic and international news and business publications available in Factiva are Barron’s, BusinessWeek, the Economist, the Far Eastern Economic Review, Forbes, Fortune, Le Monde, El Mundo, the New York Times, Newsweek, Nikkei, El Pais, the South China Morning Post, Time, the London Times, the Straits Times, the Wall Street Journal, and Die Welt.

Factiva is working with SFX to provide article-level linking via UC e-Links.  Implementation of this enhancement is projected for 2006. Currently, Factiva is best used on Windows operating systems with Internet Explorer 5.5 or higher; as of December 12, 2005, use of IE 5.5 or higher will be mandatory (and no version of IE will be supported for Macintosh).  Netscape 8.0 may be used, but it is not fully supported.  The Safari browser is recommended for Macintosh users.  Factiva will not operate with the Mozilla browser.