Virtual Business Information Center (VBIC)

The Virtual Business Information Center (VBIC) was initially developed in partnership with the College of Information Studies, the Robert H. Smith School of Business and the University of Maryland Libraries.  The intent of this collaboration was and remains to provide a “one stop shop” for authoritative, reliably curated business resources in support of users seeking dependable information for business research projects, consulting projects or for starting a business venture. The resources were selected with the intent to provide meaningful, dependable, vital information to help one make business decisions with confidence.

VBIC includes commercial fee-based databases as well as carefully evaluated free internet resources. It is designed to guide users to efficiently find information on some of the key business areas essential to analyze when starting a business: the industry, the competition, the customer. 

Each of the broad research business topics are linked to databases listed in hierarchical order of their importance to that topic. Reliable answers to inquiries dealing with: industry market size, industry trends, major competitors, consumer purchasing habits, and much more are quickly and efficiently generated.

The resources are available to University of Maryland faculty, students and staff.  VBIC is maintained by the University of Maryland Libraries business librarians: Zaida Diaz (zdiaz@umd.edu) and Lily Griner (griner@umd.edu).