New report on faculty

InsideHigherEd.com has a summary of a new government report, 2004 National Study of Postsecondary Faculty, which covers basic characteristics, work activities and compensation of instructional faculty and staff.

Calculators and Laptops Due During the TWU Strike

Calculators borrowed for the semester will be due on the last day of finals. Fines will be waived. Fines for three day laptops due during strike days will also be waived. Any questions may be emailed to circulation@baruch.cuny.edu

Library Hours Extended During January Semester

The Newman Library will be open 9:00 a.m. - 9:00 p.m., Monday - Saturday during the January 2006 Winter Session (January 2 - 25). The circulation, periodicals, reserve and laptop loan desk will be open 9:00 a.m. - 5:50 p.m Monday through Friday and 9:00 a.m. - 4:50 p.m. on Saturday. The reference desk will be open 9:00 a.m. - 4:50 p.m. Monday - Saturday. The library will be closed on Sundays.

The 6th floor computing lab and the help desk will be staffed 8:00 a.m. - 8:00 p.m. Monday - Saturday.

New report: Creative New York

Creative New York, a new report on the City's creative sector as an economic asset, is now available on the web page of Center for an Urban Future.

Student offers thanks for FARS help

When I was at the desk this morning a student stopped by and thanked us for the help with the FARS assignment. She got a 100!

Business Plan Archive

This site will be helpful in supplying students with examples of business plans. (Free registration).

http://www.businessplanarchive.org/

This recent partnership between the Library of Congress, the Center for History and New Media, and the University of Maryland Libraries brings together business plans and related planning documents from the early days of the "dot com" boom and subsequent bust.(Scout Report, 12/16/05)

Some access denied because of proprietary info.

New FARS discs for 2005 available

The 2005 FARS (Financial Accounting Research System) discs have arrived (finally--they were backordered.) One copy is available at reserve and two others will be available here at the reference desk. They will be in demand in the second semester.


The information is current as of June 1, 2005. The same information, with updates, is available on the RIA Checkpoint and CCH Business & Finance databases.

Please let me know if you have any questions.

Vendor Printer

Vendor printer is not working properly. A call has been put into Brian, and an out of order sign placed on printer.

Mighty Map: new real estate database at SIBL

SIBL has an interesting real estate database that we may want to refer our users to: Mighty Map. Here's SIBL's description of Mighty Map:

Real estate database for NYC buildings data. Provides information on buildings, lots, owners, tax liens, auctions, foreclosure sales, zoning, traffic counts, land use, subway locations, lis pendens, building permits, tax values, comparables, and more. Real estate brokers can check comparables, identify foreclosure sales and property auctions, and find developable property in the five boroughs. Comps (deed transactions) are updated monthly. Provides phone numbers of business and residential owner, including condos.

There's no remote access to this database, so users will have to go to SIBL to use it.

Win2Data is now Realquest.com

The link to Realquest.com hasn't been added to the list of databases yet, but you can still go there directly and login. We will have to log in users with a user name and password that can be found on the passwords page. Harry Gee has let me know that there are parts of this new database that we haven't subscribed to that will be on the search screen. When we get a clearer sense of what parts of the database we have access to, it will get written up on our Reference Handbook wiki and a blog post will go up here to announce it.

Win2Data access is changing

It's unavailable right now...stay tuned for details on the replacement database for it (actually, I think it will be a web-based version with a different name that is coming).

PolicyFile

PolicyFile is back up.

PolicyFile

PolicyFile is currently asking for a username/password, and thus inaccessible. We only have one sim. user, but it seems this has been going on for a while, so perhaps that is not the cause of our problem. I have asked Proquest for help to solve this.

NY Federal Reserve Bank's new research re: NY industries

New from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York:

“Urban Dynamics in New York City” (Economic Policy Review, December 2005)
A special volume collecting the papers and commentaries presented at the Bank’s April 2005 conference. The threefold goal of the conference was to focus on the historical transformations of the engine-of-growth industries in New York and distill the main determinants of the city’s historical dominance as well as the challenges to its continued success; to study the nature and evolution of immigration flows into New York; and to analyze recent trends in a range of socioeconomic outcomes, both for the general population and recent immigrants more specifically.
Read the contents:
http://www.newyorkfed.org/research/epr/2005n2.html

Reference Desk computer isn't working

The reference desk computer on the right side isn't working as it has viruses. Our systems people are working on it. I learned this Thursday night when I went to the desk. Rita

Advertisers and agencies online

Advertisers and agencies online is currently down. It is a problem with LexisNexis. They suggest trying in about an hour or so. If you try it and it's back up before I've posted anything again, please update the blog. Thanks!

CUFTS tool for indexing and full text information

Some of us may remember the handy and free resource called JAKE that allowed you to look up indexing and full text access information for a given periodical. JAKE is now defunct, but you can find similar info (though not as detailed) in Ulrichs.com.

There is now another free tool online-this one courtesy of the librarians at Simon Fraser University--that seems to do the same thing JAKE used to: CUFTS. You can find the journal look up feature for CUFTS at http://cufts.lib.sfu.ca/tools.shtml

One particularly neat trick that CUFTS can peform is a side-by-side comparison of journal access in different databases, which can be done here on the CUFTS site.

For more info on CUFTS, here's the PDF of the slides from a presentation about it given by Simon Fraser librarian Kevin Stranack about it.

NYPL has RSS feeds!

The feeds, which can be found on this page of the NYPL site, are:

• best of the web
• classes
• events for adults
• events for teens
• events for children
• exhibitions at the research libraries
• exhibitions at the branch libraries
• recent additions to databases and indexes online

via Library Stuff.

Finding old posts on this blog

There are a couple of ways to track down an old post or to search for something you think may have been posted.

Browse the "Index of Topics and Subjects" that I've set up using a free web service called del.icio.us. On the right side of every page in this blog, you'll see a link to this index as well as a sampling of some of the more popular topics. Clicking the link for the index itself will open a new page with a long list of subject descriptors (here known as "tags") that are bundled into five subsections: courses, databases, libraries, types of library users, and unbundled tags. If you want to see what's been posted on Business Source Premier, then look for it in the list of tags under "databases". Clicking the tag should show you a list of the blog posts that I've tagged as being on that particular database. At the moment, the "Business_Source_Premier" tag has been applied to six posts on the blog.

Search for your keywords in the search box on the right side of the page. This search tool is powered by a free service called Feedster. Don't bother using the search box in the upper left corner of the blue navigation bar at the top of our blog; that search tool is powered by Blogger and never seems to work very well.

Citing a numerical database in APA style

In a search today for a guide to citing a web-based numerical database (like CRSP or Compustat) in APA format, I ran across this great guide from the library at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. As you can see, it gives examples for a number of databases we have here at Baruch. The following citation guides, which usually are pretty comprehensive and ones I tend to rely on, didn't have exactly what I was looking for:

• Online! by Harnack and Kleppinger
• Diana Hacker's guide
• APA's own guide on its website
• Duke University Libraries guide

Oddly, the MLA guide to citing electronic sources that is on the library website at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro isn't nearly as good as the APA one.

Washington Post launches Congressional votes database

From the SLA News division listserv, I have learned that the Washington Post today launched a congressional votes database that covers the102nd-109th congresses (1991-present). Derek Willis, of the Post says that they are working on adding a search engine and other features to it. AdrianHolovaty, who works for washingtonpost.com, and Willis assembled the data and Holovaty built the web framework to display it. All of the data is gathered using Python, the database backend is PostgreSQL and the webframework is Django.
Comments, suggestions, brickbats much appreciated, according to the Post.

Candidate performance on the Uniform CPA exam reports

I have all of these reports in my office for a project, in case anyone else is looking for them.
They are usually in Ref HF 5630.C653.

RealQuest/Win2Data

RealQuest / Win2Data is not connecting at the moment. Saad is aware of the problem and working on it.