Stalking the Private Company: How Good Is Dun and Bradstreet's Third Volume?

For years, stalking the elusive private company was at least as hard as stalking the wild asparagus. Not constrained by the Securities and Exchange Commission or by state “blue sky laws” to disclose information about themselves, few private companies have volunteered the information. Given the cost of analyzing and disseminating data, together with the possibility that any information given out might help the competition, it would hardly have been in their best interest to do so. Librarians have long known of unpublished sources of information — the internal document a company employee can lay hands on, the annual report one's rich, old, stockholding aunt might share, or the inside dope that a customer or supplier might be willing to divulge. The trouble is, no one privy to such information comes asking a librarian for help. The rest of us, no matter how prettily we ask, are not likely to be granted access to it.