Researching Fashion Companies: A How-To Guide for CTD 320 Students
Channel: University of Alabama Libraries
Date: 2020-09-02

In this video, we'll walk you through how to use some library databases to research a specific fashion company. You'll know how to access the library resources you'll need, and use them to find things like SWOT reports. 

Transcript: 

Hi, my name is Alex Boucher, I work at Gorgas Library, and today I’m going to walk you through how to do some company research for your class  project. 
At Gorgas Library, I’m the research librarian for The College of Human Environmental Sciences, so I’m the person that is there to help you with projects like this one.  
In today’s video, I’m going to try to show you how to do a few specific things. 
First I’m going to show you how to access the library resources that you’ll need to use to complete this project. 
Second, I’ll show you how to use some of these resources.  
And finally, I’ll show you how to get in touch with me if you need some extra help with your research. 
To access the library resources you’ll need, you can start at lib.ua.edu, or go straight from mybama. If you’re on mybama, you can access most of our resources by clicking on the library tab.
From here, you have a few important links. Scout is the library’s general purpose search engine – you can use it to find eBooks, print books, academic journal articles, and more. 
The databases link is where you go to find some of the search engines that you could use to find company information. 
But in this case, we just want to go straight to the research guides, scroll down to human environmental sciences, and then scroll down to CTD 320. 
In this guide, you’ll find a few things. This video, a few databases you can use to do the research for this assignment, and my contact information. 
The easiest way to get in touch with me if you need some research help is to send me a quick email. I might be able to answer your question via email, or we can set up a meeting – either in-person or on zoom. You can also find my contact information on the libraries website or on mybama. In either case, just look under staff directory……and then scroll down. 
But now we need to show you how to use some of these databases. You’re trying to find information about your specific clothing company, and you can do that with any of the databases we have listed. 
Let’s start with D&B Hoovers.  This is a good place to go for quick information about specific companies. You can mainly ignore most of the home page, and just run a search for your company. I’ll start with Calvin Klein. Many companies will have several listings – in this case I’ll choose the North American listing. 
You’ll see lots of information on the left-hand side of the screen. You can look at company history, description, summary, and more. You can also create a PDF report at the top of the screen and then download it. 
In some cases, you will see a SWOT analysis category here. If you do see that, great. If not, you’ll just have to piece together information from the various categories. For “The Gap,” you will see a SWOT analysis, so it just goes company by company.  
Now we’ll take a look at Business Source Ultimate. I’ll run a quick search, and in this case we see a SWOT analysis right at the top. In fact, there’s several of them – the most recent should be towards the top. If we click on this – you can download the PDF….email the link to yourself….and even generate a citation in all the main citation styles. Although you will want to double check that citation.  
You can also look for different types of sources if you just click on the “source types” button. Here you’ll see all sorts of things, including but not limited to SWOT analyses. 
The last one I’ll show you today is Business Insights. Here you can run a quick search. You’ll see a variety of company information. In this case, you will not see a SWOT report. 
You can look directly for SWOT reports though. Under the companies tab you’ll click on SWOT Reports. You could scroll alphabetically, but the easiest thing to do is just search for your company in the search within.
And that’s all we’ve got for this video. Hopefully this will help you get started on your class research project, but if you need any extra help just ask me.