Volunteer Tax Assistance Program (VITA)

The VITA program will start this week in Room 320 although publicity about the program will not be released until next week. The program will operate from 10:00 am to 8:00 pm from Tuesday to Friday.

New research on NYC's economy from the Federal Reserve Bank of NY

“Challenges Facing the New York Metropolitan Area Economy,” by James Orr and Giorgio Topa. Summary: The skilled and well-educated workforce of the New York metropolitan area has played a large role in enabling the region to withstand adverse economic shocks and adapt successfully to a services economy. A further expansion of this “human capital” will enable the metro area to meet the challenges ahead: attracting new firms, maintaining immigration flows, and competing successfully with fast-growing metro areas in other parts of the country.

CUNY+ weirdness

Is it just me or has anyone else noticing some real weirdness in CUNY+ right now. In both our local catalog and the union catalog, I get the strangest result after doing a "title begins with" search for "gotham." The search shows the full title of the book I'm looking for, Gotham a history of New York City to 1898, but when I click on the title, I get a completely unrelated list of 18 different records (none of even have the word "Gotham" in the title). What's even weirder is that when I click on one of those records (say, "Plants Database") I get the full record for a completely different item: Apology, Crito, Phaedo, Symposium, Republic, translated by B. Jowett; edited, with introduction, by Louise Ropes Loomis.

Huh?

CUNY Records in WorldCat

Pat Young at CUNY Central announced today that OCLC has finished adding records for over 19,000 CUNY books and serials. This is great news! It brings our holdings up to date in WorldCat (as of August 2005). Going forward, CUNY will be sending files to OCLC monthly. The 6 month lag will always remain by agreement so that CUNY records are clean.

Hoover's offers free pass today (Thursday) for Hoover's Pro

Today is one of those infrequent days that Hoover's offers its Pro version for free. You need to register and it ends at 7 p.m. today. You can build executive lists, etc.

Register now!http://communication.hoovers.com/cgi-bin13/DM/y/eel20OktJ40FZX0Nf70Av

Periodical sample collection in 135

A small collection of various types of periodical literature is being developed and is now
available on a shelf in the closet in 135. Please feel free to add to it. Some of the issues are duplicates; some are discards.
Diane

Textbook for MGT3800

MGT3800, Management and Society, is now a communications intensive course with a new syllabus developed by Prof. Michael Stauffer and members of the business faculty. The text for this course is listed in CUNY+ under the title "Management: Communications Intensive Course, instructor:Michael Stauffer, Bernard Baruch College". When students ask for the copypack text for MGT3800, this is it. It is on Reserve at the call number HF5718 .M364 2005.

The individual titles in the course pack are also in CUNY+. They are:
-Business and Society by Anne T. Lawrence (11th ed)
-Taking Sides:Clashing Views on Controversial Issues in Business Ethics and Society by Lisa H. Newton
-Business Communication:Building Critical Skills by Kitty O. Locker (2nd ed)

Proquest Content Update

The latest content update from Proquest (Feb 2, 2006) contained a long list of permission changes that signal a disturbing trend. Euromoney Institutional Investor,Palgrave Macmillan,and Emerald Group, major publishers of important finance journals, are lengthening their embargo period to 12 months. My quick check found that most of these journals have an embargo period of 4 or 5 months in Business Source Premier.

Two questions need to be answered: Is ABI/Inform losing critical content and currency?; Do we need to subscribe to both the print and online versions of journals to serve our users?. It seems to me that by including more and more titles with embargo periods of a year, ABI becomes a database for "historical" research or even a historical repository, following the JSTOR model.

Other content changes include:
Discontinued full text coverage of the Journal of Business and Statistics, the Journal of the American Statistical Association, and The American Statistician published by the Anmerican Statistical Association
- discontinued full text coverage for several regional business journals published by American City Business Journals
- discontinued coverage of The Wall Street Transcript.

New York-New Jersy BLS

I had a telephone call Friday from a graduate student in the MPA program who is an analyst at the local Economic Analysis and Information Unit of the Bureau of Labor Statistics on Varick Street. He asked that I remind everyone that you can speak to a BLS analyst by calling 212.337.2400 and selecting menu option "0". More information can be found at the Bureau of Labor Statistics Web pages for Region 2 which covers New York, New Jersey, Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands.

WSJ and NYT together in ProQuest NewsStand

I just noticed that the ProQuest NewsStand database contains both the NYT and the WSJ.
This situation does not exist in ABI where only the WSJ is available.

Diane

Who's Who remote access problem

There is an "easy proxy" problem w Who's Who which seems to be interrupting
remote access. Mike said this may be similar to a problem with
Euromonitor. Both remote access problems have been reported to Saad.

(Who's Who permits only 1 user at a time to access the database)

Diane

Printer at reference desk

Printer is again jamming, even with plain paper. Help desk request sent. #4330.
Diane

Info on scholars in CSA search results (forthcoming feature)

As you can see from this tutorial from CSA (Cambridge Scientific Abstracts), we will soon see a "Community of Scholars" tab in our search results in the databases we get from them (e.g., Philosopher's Index, Social Services Abstracts, and Sociological Abstracts). From what I can tell from the CSA tutorial, on the new tab there will be additional info about the authors whose articles came up (basically, info take from the author affiliate field) and the ability to browse through the list of authors by subjects/disciplines.

Although the "Community of Scholars" feature isn't available yet (so I haven't had a chance to actually run searches yet in the enhanced interface), it seems like this might be useful in helping our users think more critically about who an authority is (where is the author affiliated, is he/she they writing about a topic that seems to be out of their discipline, etc.) It may also enhance our efforts to teach students about the world of academic discourse as one characterized by competing and complementary voices of authors.

Some news re: Resume printing in the BCTC

Last Thursday night a student came to the reference desk wanting to print his resume on resume paper like in the BCTC. When I told him the service was available only in the BCTC, he told me that the resume printing service in the BCTC was only available until 5 p.m. I have checked with the BCTC help desk and learned that the 5 p.m. cutoff is the present policy, but if there is a lab manager available students may seek the lab manager out after 5 p.m. for assistance with resume printing. This probably came up Thursday night because the internship fair was on Friday afternoon. But it is good to know.

Reference desk PC not working

One of the two sit-down terminals for staff to use at the reference desk isn't working this morning; it won't turn on at all. I've submitted a helpdesk request (job ID # 4328).

Update: As of Wed., Feb. 8, it's working again.

Solutions Manual for Kieso's Intermediate Accounting no longer on reserve

At the request of accountancy faculty, the two-volume paperback Solution Manual for Kieso's Intermediate Accounting has been removed from reserves. (The copies were on reserve under Benis.) The main reason for the removal was the students in the classes using this book now have electronic access to homework problems selected by their professors. The problems are also graded electronically. The professors did not want all the problems and the solutions available via reserves. If there are questions, students should consult their accounting professors.

Guest logins are working ...

as of this morning.

Diane

EDGAR Filings and XBRL

For those of you who attended the EDGAR Online demo this morning and are confused or intrigued by the XBRL standards movement there is a good article in the January/February issue of Financial Executive (available through ABI/Inform). "Ask FERF about...Sources of Information on XBRL" is a guide to key documents at the websites of the XBRL consortium, the SEC, and the Financial Executive Research Foundation. They also suggest reading a white paper from EDGAR Online.
Although the SEC is promoting filing reports in XBRL, the number of companies in their voluntary program is still very small. Go to this page in the EDGAR archives to see all the XRBL reports filed since the program was announnced in 2004.

Guest Logins -- Temporarily not working

There is a problem with creating guest login accounts. When trying to login to create an account, you will get the following error message, "Authentification failed". Saad has been contacted. It is due to a problem with a BCTC server--and an update is needed. Saad was told that the problem should be resolved by the afternoon, today (Feb. 2nd).

FirstGov.gov gets a tune-up

The search engine behind FirstGov.gov is now powered by Microsoft's MSN search tool and results are now clustered using technology from Vivisimo. Details can be found on this article in Government Computer News.

Here's a sample search from FirstGov.gov for "baruch college." Note how you can switch between search results "by topic," "by agency," or "by source."