During the tax season, the reference desk gets a lot of tax-related questions. In addition to questions about which tax forms to use, we occasionally get asked to look up historic stock price information. As some of you may know, there are a number of websites that make some historical stock price information available for free. Two that are particularly popular are Yahoo Finance and BigCharts.com.

But sometimes when a company has been acquired by another company or merged with another computer, it can be particularly difficult to find out historical price information for the company prior to those events. Fortunately, the library can help in some of these cases. One print resource that we turn to is the Directory of Obsolete Securities. Its call number is REF 332.67 D, and we would be glad to point it out to you if you would like to look through it.

When the Directory of Obsolete Securities isn't sufficient, we sometimes are able to locate other sources of information online. For example, tonight, I helped a customer look up historical price information about the company Unocal prior to its merger with Chevron. By searching for "historic stock prices for unocal" on Google, I found a page in the Chevron Corporation investor relations website that included a downloadable Excel file with historical price information from 1980-2005. I must say it was a satisfying experience to hunt down this information and provide it to the customer right at the reference desk!

So if you are ever in need of historical stock price information, be sure to keep us in mind!!