I was surprised to read on this Web site that in the UK there is no legal deposit requirement for company annual reports. There are collections of annual reports at many academic institutions that have business schools and at many public library business departments. The purpose of the SCoRe (Searchable Company Reports) project is to provide an online database of holdings and collections of company reports in UK libraries.
The ScoRe Web site has come about through a project funded by the Research Support Libraries Programme, entitled “Company annual reports: assuring the distributed national print archive”. The audiences identified by the project are listed as: “Researchers wishing to trace copies of company annual reports in libraries; managers of company report collections in libraries; anyone interested in assuring the future of these important information sources.”
A total of 23 collections are covered and these have quite a good geographic spread although there is inevitably a concentration in London. Key locations include: Southampton, Cardiff, Warwick, in the north of England – Manchester and Leeds, in Scotland – Edinburgh, Aberdeen and Glasgow. The ScoRe database lists over 15,000 companies from the UK, Europe, North America, Asia and Australasia. A number of these include company data such as address, activity sector and Web site. In total, the database carries over 166,000 individual reports for those companies. These are housed in collections at libraries around the UK; details of format and location are included with each record. Included are historical reports from as early as 1881.
The Web site is well structured and contains much useful information, none of it irrelevant. It is well designed and easy to navigate. The database is efficient, simple to use and performs well. There are few typographic errors or misspellings. The database is searchable in a number of ways. First, it is possible to find out which of the library collections holds a particular report, for example, Tadpole Technologies plc. annual report for 1999. It is possible to list all reports for a company by collection, sector or country. Company name changes, the bane of every business librarian’s working life, can be made easier with earlier and later names being linked. Brief company details such as address, website sector and country are listed for some entries. Searches can be refined or restricted in a number of ways, for instance the user may limit geographically by choosing only to search the collections in Scotland.
The only downside to this Web site is that it appears to have been funded as part of a temporary project. Little information about the future of the project or the Web site itself is included. The worry is that such an excellent resource as this might disappear.
