Library Open 24-hours during Mid-terms

The Newman Library will be open 24 hours for mid-term examinations. The
dates were chosen by Undergraduate Student Government in consultation with
the Vice President for Student Development and Enrollment Management. The
library will open at 7:00 a.m. on October 19 and remain open continuously
until 11:59 p.m. on October 27. The same rules that we apply during
extended hours for final exams will also apply in this case. After midnight
access to the library will be restricted to Baruch College students.

Library Instruction Wiki

As noted on this recent posting on the Librarians with Class blog, there's a new library instruction wiki up that may grow to be a valuable clearinghouse of ideas for information competency.

English 2150 assignment help

Peggy and I assisted a student in Prof. Burger's English 2150 class with an assignment to write about a modern-day poem based on a fairy tale. We found that Anne Sexton wrote "Cinderella"in a book of poetry Transformations, which is not available here at Baruch, but her Complete Poems is available at PS3537.E915 A17 1981. We printed several bibliographies of poems and fairy tales that we found. They are at the reference desk.

Computer Security at the Reference Desk

Starting today all librarians staffing the reference desk must login at the start of their shift using their personal username and ID. When you leave the desk, remember to sign out.

Industry Codes

Recently a student looking for world trade data asked which international industry codes to use. The key international system is ISIC from the United Nations which students can view from the UN Classifications Registry site.

If students need to translate SIC codes or NAICS codes to ISIC, there is a Website, Jon Haveman's Industry Concordances , that links to translations of codes for various industry coding systems including ISIC, SIC, NAICS, NACE, HS, TSUSA, and SITC.

For more about the various industry and product coding systems used for trade data, Columbia University has a guide to Codes Used for Reporting Trade Data.

Articles on Technical Analysis

An MBA class has an assignment to compile a bibliography on technical analysis using peer-reviewed journals. Neither ABI/Inform nor Business Source Premier use "technical analysis" as a subject term although articles with author supplied keywords will often use the term. One workaround is to combine "technical analysis" with the subject terms "investment*" or "finance" or with one of the various technical analysis methods like candlestick charting. Harry also suggested Scopus as a relevant database and it brought up titles not found in ABI or BSP.

Full web access at public PCs

At the end of this summer, new Dell PCs were installed on the 2nd floor. Some were placed in the cubicles where there used to be Macs that only had CUNY+ access (those terminals have been moved around a bit) and others were placed in the cubicles across from the reference desk where there were already three PCs with full web access.

At the moment, all the new PCs that have been set up do not have full web access (there is no address window in the browser), so users can't get beyond the library web site, the Baruch web site, and things like eSIMS and Blackboard. Saad's staff will change the browsers in these PCs sometime soon.

ProQuest corrects our Historical Newspapers subscription

Our free ride has ended. ProQuest just realized that they had accidentally given us access to more titles in ProQuest Historical Newspapers than we had paid for (the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal). We no longer have access to:

• Atlanta Constitution (1868-1925)
• Boston Globe (1872-1901)
• Chicago Tribune (1860-1969)

Spinoff and merger examples--American Express, Ameriprise; Procter & Gamble and Gillette

If you need an example of a spinoff, American Express and Ameriprise are a current example. The spinoff was completed last Friday, and Ameriprise, formerly American Express Financial Advisers, started trading on NYSE today with the ticker AMP. Ameriprise representatives rang the opening bell at NYSE today.

The closing bell was rung by officials of Procter & Gamble, which acquired the Gillette Company today. American Express's and the Procter & Gamble and the Gillette Company's homepages are a source of all the filings that are needed for spinoffs and mergers.

MS Office Tip: Use Word Wraps and Line Breaks in Excel

One of my favorite blogs, Lifehacker, posted this handy tip for adding paragraph breaks to a long cell in Microsoft Excel.

Bloomberg information

Last Thursday I attended an open house at Bloomberg's headquarters. I attended some short information sessions on independent research and corporate governance. I received some reports and search guides that Bloomberg has prepared on these topics and subjects. If you want to see them, please let me know.

Economic Census 2002 Information

I attended a workshop on the 2002 Economic Census sponsored by the Census Bureau last Friday. I have extra copies of the handouts if you want to see them. The Powerpoint presentation is available.

Among the most important things that I learned:
The Economic Census reports are the only census reports that include both businesses with employers and businesses without paid employees. The American FactFinder, a quick link on the Census's web site, and the other reports, do not include businesses without paid employees. Businesses without paid employees number in the millions--ma and pa businesses owned by the couple, taxi drivers who rent their cabs, many used car dealers, and perhaps consultants who own their own business, etc.

The Census Bureau also had good questions for examples of limitations of the data. For example, if one is trying to determine the number of casinos, one must also search for casinos in hotels. (I didn't know that New Jersey requires a casino to be in a hotel.) Connecticut is an example of a state in which the number of receipts from casinos is suppressed to avoid identifying single businesses--Connecticut has two casinos and if you knew the receipts of one casino, you can figure the amount of the other.

Librarians' Index to the Internet revamped

As of September 30, the Librarians' Index to the Internet has been completely redesigned and renamed. It is now known as the Librarians' Internet Index.

• Old version of lii.org
• New version of lii.org
  

NYCdata at the Weissman Center

Prof. Eugene J. Sherman and the Weissman Center for International Business, have compiled a database of statistics, NYCdata, about "New York City, the capital of the modern world". The compendium covers 16 topics including population and geography, income and wages, fiscal data, international trade, housing, education, culture and business activity and headquarters. You can connect to the site at http://www.baruch.cuny.edu/nycdata/

Mental Measurements Yearbook

Access has been restored.

Social Explorer

Presented at the last ERAC meeting, Susan showed us a new resource, free for now, called Social Explorer.

Social Explorer is based at Queens College of the City University of New York. They provide demographic data in data maps to track visually the changes that have occurred in the United States, from 1790 to the present, from the country level ot the county level.

Point to: http://www.socialexplorer.com

Mental Measurements Yearbook

At this time there are problems accessing Mental Measurements Yearbook. I'm working on getting this fixed up and will let you know when access is restored.

Mike

Exalead: An Interesting Search Engine

After reading an interesting column by Mary Ellen Bates in EContent about Google falling behind in offering advanced tools for searching and results filtering, I tried out one of the alternative search engines she recommended: Exalead. This engine offers in one place a lot of nifty features not all found in one web search tool:

• word stemming
• phonetic search (will search for words that sound like the ones you type)
  
• proximity searching (within 16 words)
  
• clustering of results
• thumbnail images of pages in search results
• suggestions of related terms
• clickable filters for document/file types (e.g., you can winnow search results list to only PDFs, or only DOCs, or only PPTs, etc.

Here's a sample search for "death with dignity." As you can see, the list of related terms on the left side of the search results page is fairly comprehensive. The "related terms" feature alone may make this useful when trying help students brainstorm about other keywords to consider.

There's no pretending Exalead has as large an index as Google. The range of features, though, offered on Exalead's search results page (as well as on its advanced search page) make it an attractive alternative (especially considering that right now, as far as I know, it is the only engine that allows for proximity searching

Euromonitor GMID

Our access to Euromonitor has been reactivated.

TRIAL -- IMF International Financial Statistics

We have a trial to the IMF International Financial Statistics:
The IFS database contains approximately 32,000 time series covering more than 200 countries and areas and includes all series appearing on the IFS Country Pages; exchange rate series for all Fund member countries, plus Aruba and the Netherlands Antilles; major Fund accounts series; and most other world, area, and country series from the IFS World Tables.

You will need a password to get in.