Cool New ReferenceUSA Tool by Norma S.

My friend Kay is taking her 14 year old niece to Boston after school is out both for fun and to learn more about the history of the area. One of the things that her niece likes to do is go clothes shopping at any thrift outlets she can find. So my friend asked me if I could get together a list of thrift stores for them. Since she wasn’t sure yet where they were going to stay I got on ReferenceUSA and set about trying to find her a list with addresses and phone numbers.

 

Kay decided it would be a good idea for her to bring her niece to the library so that she could learn how to find things like this for herself. I showed her how to get to the databases from the SCDL home page and how they were organized. We then pulled up ReferenceUSA and started to hunt for thrift stores in Boston.

Because this is so specific we decided that a custom search was called for rather then a quick search so we selected Keyword/SIC/NAICS and the city knowing that the last one would also ask for the state.

 

 

 

When we started looking for Thrift stores ReferenceUSA pulled up quite a large list of suggestions under the business type. Since both Kay and Kim like vintage clothing we also included that in our search.

Surprisingly for a city the size of Boston there are only 16 stores of this type that fit into our selected parameters.

 

 

 

 

I printed out the list for them and because ReferenceUSA has added a couple of new features and one of them is the Heat Map

 

This shows where these stores are located in and around the city so I printed that out for them as well.

 

The map is interactive so you can zoom in and out on the area that you’re interested in.