No printing yet for accounting conference attendees

Although conference attendees do have guest logins for the public PCs, the vendor card printer system does not work when they have logged in. On the 8 PCs behind the reference desk (the ones that don't require any login), the vendor card printing system does work...but these PCs are limited to databases, Blackboard, etc. and do not allow access to the open web.

Borrowing Reference Books

The Newman Library policy is that reference books and non-circulating titles cannot be borrowed from the library but if a faculty member needs an item for his/her research, we can make a case-by-case decision to let the item circulate for a limited time. Please refer the professsor to the Head of Reference for authorization and to determine the lending period. A copy of the signed authorization slip will be kept in a folder at the reference desk. Since the faculty must still take the item to Access Services for check out and return, a record of the due date will appear in the Baruch holdings record.

Finding Credit Ratings

I was helping a student yesterday find credit ratings for the Gap, Inc and found out some interesting things. All the major rating agencies, Moody's, Standard & Poor's, and Fitch, announce rating actions through press releases. Moody's ratings are released through their Moody's Investors Service Press Releases available through Factiva. Search with the subject term "corporate credit ratings." Both the Fitch Wire and S&P Credit Wire are available in the ThomsonONE Analytics database in the Subotnick Center. If you would like to see a sample of a credit announcement, Standard & Poor's posts today's releases at their website.

Internet Access for Accountancy Conferees

Baruch will be hosting "The Critical Perspectives on Accounting" conference from April 28 to May 2. All attendees will get guest accounts to use the wireless network and the computers in the library. These accounts will be distributed at the conference registration desk on the 14th floor of the VC. Attendees will have to purchase a vendor card to print from library computers.

Astrid Unterrede to see Rita

Astrid Unterrede is coming in for the CPA conference about 4 p.m. and she can leave her luggage in my office. She knows that I will be back about 5:30 p.m.

Thanks, Rita

I will let security know too.

Nice tutorial on how to set up a feed reader

Want to keep tabs on more than one blog or feed without having to hopscotch around the web to many different sites? Set up a Bloglines account. Here's a nice guide on how to do it.

Database of learning materials for higher ed

MERLOT is a free database of links to learning materials that colleges have posted on their web sites. There are links to handouts, tutorials, guides, etc., all to be found in abundance here. You can browse the collection or become a member so that you can submit links for your own material (as long as that material is already available on the web).

Impact of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act

A frequent question from accounting and other students is the impact of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act. Yesterday, the U.S. House of Representatives' Committee on Financial Services had a hearing on "The Impact of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act". Testimony was given by the Chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, William H. Donaldson, and the Chairman of the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board, William J. McDonough. For the testimony, and other information on the hearing, please see: http://financialservices.house.gov/hearings.asp?formmode=detail&hearing=376.

There are many articles and studies being done on the impact of this law. However, not all the articles use "impact." As you work with the students, ask them if they want to focus on a particular aspect of implementing the law. Section 404, dealing with compliance, has a great deal written about it.

The Library of Congress site is redesigned

Much cleaner design. Check out the new web site.

Librarians' Index to the Internet survey

The Librarians' Index to the Internet web site is about to be redesigned. If you are a user of this site and want to help them as they plan the redesign, please consider taking this brief survey.

EITF assignment of accounting students

A number of students have been looking for specific EITF (Emerging Issues Task Force) documents from the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) today. Although the FARS disk has EITF materials, it is only current as to Nov. 2003. I would suggest that the students search either CCH Business & Finance or RIA Checkpoint. I have placed several extra copies of my searching FARS handout in the drawer with the FARS discs. This covers the basics of searching RIA and CCH.(The free FASB site, www.fasb.org, doesn't have all the abstracts available.)

Here are the paths for CCH and RIA :

Once logged onto CCH Business & Finance, click Securities tab.
Then scroll down to the SEC Accountants' Module (near the bottom)
Select Financial Accounting Standards (FASB)
The EITF Abstracts are one of the sections that can be search.
Either select the EITF Abstracts and look for the numbered abstracts or
Click on Find by Citation and type in the number of the abstract that is needed in the appropriate search box for the EITF.
(You could search by Citation as soon as you are logged on to the database, but this will result in several pages of search boxes, and scrolling down to the EITF. I think since this is the first time the students are using the database, going first to the Financial Accounting Standards is easier.)


The advantage of using RIA Checkpoint is the internal links in the EITF abstracts, which CCH does not offer. These links are a quick way to get to any referenced material without doing a new search.

For RIA Checkpoint.
After logging on, Change the practice area to WG&L Rptg & Management. (The default is tax, which won't get this assignment done.)
The fast way here:
Click More under Find by Citation, FASB Original Pronouncements. (Far left column, under Keyword Search)
This provides the search boxes for the EITF documents. Type in the desired number.

Alternative route (more scenic route?)
After logging on to RIA Checkpoint,
change to WG&L Rptg & Management.
Click on Table of Contents,
Select W G & L in the list,
Then select FRM Source Materials
Then Select FASB
Then select EITF Abstracts
The list of EITF abstracts appear. They are numbered by year and then within a year.
The appropriate EITF abstract would need to be selected.

I hope that this is helpful.
I do not plan to offer any more FARS workshops this year. The attendance was light at the workshops that I gave and no students contacted me when I posted the schedules to the accounting students' email to suggest alternative times.

Rita

Prof. Heinrich's assignment to use the Readers' Guide to Periodical Literature for stories related to the Cuban Missile Crisis

Lisa has discovered that the page in the Readers' Guide to Periodical Literature relating to stories on the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962 has been torn from the volume. Prof. Heinrich's history class has an assignment due today to use the Readers' Guide to Periodical Literature. Mike Waldman is seeing if the page can be faxed to us. In the meanwhile, Lisa suggests telling the students to use the microfilm for the four periodicals that are suggested in the assignment and for the dates that they are to search. I called the professor and left a message regarding the problem that occurred.

Rita

WilsonWeb -- no Browse searching

From WilsonWeb:

This is to advise you that during the early hours of April 18th that the WilsonWeb system went down for several hours. Although the system is now back up and available for searching, there remains a problem with the Browse which impacts dropdown choices, making them temporarily unavailable.
We are currently working to restore full service to your WilsonWeb interface. Please accept our apologies for any inconvenience caused. Thank you for your patience and understanding.
B. Seiler
H.W. Wilson Company

Requests for back issues of Electronics Magazine

You may have heard recently about how Intel has put up a $10,000 bounty for a pristine copy of the 1965 issue of Electronics Magazine in which Gordon Moore first proposed his law about the doubling of memory (if you haven't heard about it, you can read it about it here). Although here at Baruch we only have Electronics Magazine in microfilm (and that only from the 1980s on), other local libraries are beginning to pull this magazine from their stacks so it doesn't disappear.

Accessing the CUNY Portal

There are some interesting tutorials in Baruch's new Digital Media Library that Arthur mentioned on the library news feed a few days ago. One of those tutorials details how students can access the CUNY portal. Students can be directed to this page to view the tutorial.

Password for ACC 4100 instructor's manual

Prof. Eckstein has put an instructor's manual on reserve for her section of ACC 4100. The call number is password protected so that only students from her section of ACC 4100 can have access to the instructor's manual. If a student asks you for help with this password, refer them to the Circulation Desk, where a library assistant will first verify that the student is in Prof. Eckstein's section before giving them access.

Vounteer Tax Assistance Program

The Hours for this service are
Wednesday 10am-8pm
Thursday and Friday 10am-5:30pm.

People should not be sent up to 320 when the volunteers are
not in.

Visitors Today

A group of students from Bertram High School will be visiting the library today between 3 and 4:30 p.m. as part of the College Now program.

Citation Linker in SFX version 3

The address for the citation linker in the new version of SFX is:

http://sfx.cuny.edu:9003/sfx_local/cgi/core/citation-linker.cgi

Celebrate National Library Week

New York Public Library is celebrating National Library Week tomorrow with two hours of public reading.

'WISE GUYS': GREAT MINDS ON GREAT ISSUES

April 13, 2005
11:00 a.m. - 1:00 p.m.
The New York Public Library, Science, Industry and Business Library
Lower Level Conference Room 014/015

If you can take time during your lunch break, John Ganly, Assistant Director, Collections, has invited us to participate as readers or as part of the audience. The list of book selections includes some of your favorite business titles.

Fortune's "The Smartest Books We Know"

The March 21st issue of Fortune includes their list of the 75 best business books. Their criteria: wisdom in a great read. The list includes some classics like Drucker's The Effective Executive but popular titles like Barbarians at the Gate, Chainsaw, and Moneyball predominate. Books are listed by topics including ethics, leadership, globalization, power, decision-making, strategy, work and life, and Wall Street.

Google Q&A

There a good post detailing Google's new Q&A feature today on the News Breaks section of the Information Today web site. The new Google service gives you "answers" (as well as the usual list of search results) when you type in a question. For example, if you type in "when did thomas jefferson die" (click here to run this query in Google), you'll see that the first item above the search results says:

Thomas Jefferson
Date of Death: 4 July 1826
According to http://www.who2.com/thomasjefferson.html

This feature is worth knowing about but maybe not worth relying on in any regular way.

Library locations handout

Spencer has updated the handout of library locations that we keep copies of at the reference desk. Here's a link to the file in case an electronic version is ever needed.

Trial of Corbis database

Check out the trial of the Corbis Images for Education database, which has a pretty amazing collection. Here's the link (which will only work here on campus).

Historical newspapers online from ProQuest

I wanted to follow up on Sandy's recent post in BBLIB about the correct dates of coverage for the Chicago Tribune in ProQuest (1860-1969) with a post here detailing what newspapers we have deep, full text access to via ProQuest:

• Atlanta Constitution (1868-1925)
  
• Boston Globe (1872-1901)
  
• Chicago Tribune (1860-1969)
  
• New York Times (1851-2001)
  
• Wall Street Journal (1889-1987)
  

At the moment, there is no link on our Information Resources page that gets you straight to this collection of old newspapers, which is formally called ProQuest Historical Newspapers. But if you go into any of the ProQuest databases already listed on the Information Resources page (ABI/Inform Global, American Periodicals Series, New York Times 1851-2001, and Wall Street Journal 1889-1987), you can then select from within the ProQuest interface one of the other databases with the newspapers listed above.

UPDATE: As noted in an Oct. 3, 2005, post on this blog, access to these additional titles has ended.

Dissertations in ABI

I was in touch with Kate Jashari, our ProQuest/Factiva "account developer and trainer" regarding the scope of dissertations who wrote back:
"Here is a statement from Jackie Adams, our ABI/Inform product manager: They were chosen from the existing pool of PQ dissertations using a search on multiple subject codes related to: Business Administration, Economics, Education/Business. I looked them over to make sure they were subject appropriate to ABI. There are approx. 75% Doctoral Dissertations and 25% Master Theses. In general we stayed between 1999 - 2002. There are some earlier dissertations that were chosen because they matched the authors in Scholar Universe. Here's information about the Scholar Universe Author Profiles she mentions. You can see some profiles by searching ABI for AU(James Hoffman) and viewing the indexing of any of his articles.Author Profiles from scholar Universe are available in ABI/INFORM! – The web's fastest growing collection of accurate, regularly updated, and richly linked Authority Profile™ content covering faculty members, published authors, professional researchers and their organizational affiliations is linked inside of ABI/INFORM®. "

(Scholar Universe seems to be some sort of product ProQuest recently acquired. I still plan to be in touch with Kate. If you have questions or comments, please let me know).

Fortune 500 List

I'd like to repeat the information about accessing the Fortune 500 list. The list will come out in the April 11 issue but is available online to subscribers at the Fortune Website now. The online version has several advantages in that it can be downloaded and it provides internal links. (Instructions for access will be on our reference passwords list.)

Proquest Enhancements

Presentations from the Computers in Libraries 2005 Conference have been posted on the Web and one that might be useful for us in evaluating the new ProQuest interface is their presentation on "Five Ways to Make Search Smarter." (Scroll down to the Exhibit Hall Cybertours for March 17th.) It shows how to use the controlled vocabulary, indexing, metadata and thesauri.

Business Plans Handbook

I am not sure everyone knows that the reference series, Business Plans Handbook, is available online through the Gale Virtual Reference Library. Over 240 unique business plans have been published in the series. Volumes 1 to 10 (1995 to 2004) are in the reference collection at HD62.7 .B865; volumes 5 to 10 (1998 to 2004) are online. You can browse the contents of each volume of the online version or search across all the business titles (use "business plan" and the name of the type of company/industry.) Reports are in PDF format.

Writing Critiques of Sociology Articles

Students have been asking how to write a critique of a sociology article. Gerry tells me that there are books on reserve for Prof. Sylvia that might help. The course is SOC4900 and the titles are The Sociology Student Writer's Manual and A Guide to Writing Sociology Papers.

Infoshare down

According to Infoshare "something has attacked their server". They know there is a problem and are working on it.

WTC Report released by the National Institute of Standards and Technology

From Gotham Gazette today:

For The World Trade Center report, issued by the National Institute of Standards and Technology today,including links to a summary, the press briefing and full report, go to http://wtc.nist.gov/

Corporate Governance

I answered an e-mail reference question last week that I thought I would share. The student wanted to identify companies that had corporate governance policies. One way to approach this question is to use a database, the Board Analyst, at the Website of The Corporate Library. It gives free access to policies of the Fortune 500 companies but you must register to use it. (The database covers many more companies than the Fortune 500 but only the 500 are free.) You can search the database by market cap, SIC code, industry group or headquarters state in addition to company name. The results page will link to the actual policy.

Ratio Analysis Assignment

Prof. Rogoff's MGT9865 class, Entrepreneurial Ventures, is working on an assignment to create balance sheets and income statements for industries. They have the NAICS codes for their industries and have been told to use the RMA Annual Statement Studies for the data. Last night while working with several of these students, we had to dig for the data because their industry was not covered in RMA. You can refer the students to the Library Guide on Ratio Analysis for alternative sources. Troy's Almanac uses NAICS but Industry Norms and Key Business Ratios (Dun & Bradstreet) still uses SIC codes. Reuters is also another possibility but it uses GICS codes.

Beyond the sources listed in the Guide, students can use composite data from a group of comparable companies such as that found in the Factiva Comparision Report, the S&P Stock Reports, Value Line, etc.

Fewer Full Text in Ebsco/Proquest

The following Q&A appeared on today's Buslibs-l:

> > Good morning, > > I'd be interested in finding out if searchers are finding fewer and fewer > fulltext business trade journals in popular online publication databases, from > vendors like Gale and ProQuest. Doing searches on files like 13 (BAMP),15 > (ABI/INFORM),16 (PROMT) and 148 (TRADE & INDUSTRY) on Dialog seem to no longer turn > up as many high profile business trade journals as in the recent past. > > Have others had this or related experiences? > > Thanks for any feedback, > > Bob Berkman, editor > The Information Advisor > www.informationadvisor.com > > = - = -
= - = - = - = - = - = - = - = - = - = - = - = - = - = - = - = >

Right on, Bob. Here are a couple of excerpts from my Oct 04 column in
Business Information Alert.
...Now journal and newspaper publishers are changing the locks on the
online information storehouses, transferring their special features to
separate, paid databases. ÜSuperBrandsß (Brandweek) and ÜLeading
National Advertisersß (Advertising Age) are among the most prominent
journal features that are turning us back to the printed page.

No one can dispute the reference value of the well-researched rankings
and analyses that these trade journals provide, but managing a disparate
collection of one-trick ponies is an added burden for libraries. Some
publishers have not only introduced a premium charge for special reports,
but have removed their archives (leaving a gap if the print subscription
was discontinued) to yet another fee based service. Pay for the current
edition. Pay more for the archives. Pay still more for the special
reports or supplements. How many more ways can you slice the sausage?

....Think you¬re safe if you¬re an EBSCO database customer? Dream on.
These special features are generally no longer provided to aggregate
vendors, a blow to Proquest, EBSCO and other vendors whose customers may
now question the value of products with diminishing content. I suppose
we¬ll eventually see a database that rounds up all these feral fee
seekers.

Terese M. Terry. Lippincott Library. Wharton School. U of PA. USA
terryt@wharton.upenn.edu www.library.upenn.edu/lippincott
Columnist, Business Information Alert.

New source of free full-text articles

LookSmart, the company that runs FindArticles, has just launched a new site offering free, full-text articles from sources they've deemed relevant for college students. The site is called 24HourScholar; you can view the list of publications available here.

GMAT guide missing

If anyone finds a copy of the Official Guide for GMAT Review (Princeton, N.J.: Graduate Management Admission Council, 2000), please put it back on Index Table 8A. It appears to be missing and may have been hidden on one the shelves. The call number for this reference book is HF 1118 .O33. If we find it (or buy a new one), perhaps we should put this on reserve or in ready reference.

Online archive of billboard advertisements

As noted on a posting today on ResourceShelf, there's an interesting archive of billboards. You can search a number of ways (by advertiser, by agency, by keyword, or by year). The oldest billboards only go back to 1995, though.