The Women's Business Resource Guide

Lists programs, organizations, and resources, and includes tips on getting a business started

This work is the collaborative effort of a wife-and-husband team with expertise in small business, marketing, and writing. They developed it to meet the needs of women who want to start their own businesses and need information on how to begin. The statistics quoted in the introduction note that women are starting businesses at two to five times the rate of men and that they have a 75 percent success rate compared with an average of 20 percent for all businesses.

More than 600 programs, resources, and organizations are listed. The work begins with an excellent introduction that explains the purpose and organization of information. This is followed by five chapters: "Training"; "Technical Assistance and Counseling"; "Information Sources"; "Selling to the Government"; "Membership Organizations"; and "Resource, Program and Agency Listings." A small figure of a woman is used to identify those resources that deal exclusively with women. The resources are not limited to print but include such electronic sources as SBA Online as well. Directory information consists of address, telephone number, and fax number, if available, followed by a brief explanation of the type of help one can expect. A bibliography, "Books for and about Women in Business," is provided in chapter 2.

Final sections include a quick guide to common terms and an index, which is the book's only weakness. The authors of works are listed, but not titles. The directory information in chapter 5 is not indexed. For example, under yellow pages, women's, the user is directed to the "Information Sources" chapter, which explains what these works are, but not to the list of these directories in the last chapter.

A number of valuable resources for women have been published recently, such as Encyclopedia of Women's Associations Worldwide [RBB F 1 94] and Resourceful Woman [RBB My 15 94]. With this much information, some overlap is inevitable, but each work has a unique niche to fill. The Women's Business Resource Guide is a useful purchase for any library with a business collection and should be recommended to any woman who inquires about starting her own business.

A communications consultant and a freelance writer have compiled a slim, repetitive list of federal, state, and private resources with some brief annotations. The first chapter covers training, technical assistance, and counseling. Subsequent chapters concern information sources, selling to the government, membership organizations, programs, and agencies. The work relies heavily on listings from the Small Business Administration's Office of Women's Business Ownership. The same offices and agencies are listed under several different headings. Much of this information is available from other sources, including appendixes to Joanne Wilkens's Her Own Business: Success Secrets of Entrepreneurial Women (McGraw, 1987) and other trade books cited in the chapter on information sources. The reader is also directed to the Federal Information Center, the "Free Business Catalog" from the Superintendent of Documents, and state blue books. Recommended for large public libraries and specialized women's business collections.
Michelynn McKnight, Norman Regional Hosp. Lib., Okla.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.