Carl Fox asked:

>We are currently evaluating corporate and private foundation data
>bases as a means to locate information on potential sponsors.  I am
>interested in any recommendations from you as to which ones you found
>particularly useful.  Thank you.

We use Sources of Foundations by Orca in our sponsored programs
office.  It's better than nothing but most of the time it just
doesn't fit with faculty doing research which is most of what we do.
The search mechanism is not very powerful so that you end up
looking through a lot of things that are limited to specific
states or even counties.  And as with any database with foundations
the descriptions can be so vague ("The Joe Shmo Foundation funds
higher education") that it is hard to know which are good potential
funding sources and which are not.

Our development office on the other hand uses the Foundation Center
info on Dialog as well as Sources, and other stuff I do not know
about.  They are dealing with more institutional projects and
raising the big bucks not faculty research so something like Sources
is more useful to them.

I would love to hear about other such databases and if you would
please summarize whatever comments you receive and post them back to
the list.  Thanks.

Mike

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 Michael Ludwick                                    / \
 Associate Director of Sponsored Programs ___  __   |o|   __  ___
 Grants and Research Administration    ___| |__||___| |___||__| |___
 College of William and Mary          /                             \
 P.O. Box 8795                       /   # # # # #  /o\  # # # # #   \
 Williamsburg, VA  23187-8795        |   # # # # # / # \ # # # # #   |
 email: xxxxxx@grants.wm.edu           |   # # # # # |===| # # # # #   |
 phone: 757.221.3485                 |             | H |             |
 fax:   757.221.4910                 |_____________=====_____________|
 website: http://www.wm.edu/AI/Grants

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