New Home for Reference at Newman Library

Early next week (around June 22 or June 23), you will want to keep your eyes open for a message in your email inbox inviting you to join the Reference at Newman Library blog. Over the past month, I have been setting up our reference blog on a different blogging platform. Instead of using Blogger, as has been the case for nearly five years, we will be using WordPress. Our blog will be locally hosted here at Baruch, which will give us much greater control over the look and feel of the site and end our being at the mercy of Google, which owns Blogger.

As soon as you have clicked the link in the email to accept the invite and set up your WordPress account, you may want to customize your profile in WordPress so your real name and not your user name appears on the blog posts:

1. While logged in to WordPress, click on your name in the top right corner where it says, "Howdy, [your name]."
2. The page that opens will be the "Profile" page where you can type in your first and last name and select from various name display options where it says "Display name publicly as."
3. Click the "Update Profile" button on the bottom of that page to save your changes.

The old site will not be taken down or altered in any way. The new site will still have an index of blog posts; from this point on, that index will list posts by topic from both sites. There is also be a search feature on the new blog that will search both sites at the same time.

If you'd like to take a peak at the new blog, you can find it at:

http://blsciblogs.baruch.cuny.edu/newmanreference/

There are still some areas on the new site that are being developed. The pages for "Baruch Blogs" and "LIS Blogs" will feature headlines from notable blogs. I'm still working with Luke Waltzer from the Schwartz Communication Institute to figure out the best way to present republished blog posts (I have something in mind that looks like what Factiva does with its "News Pages.")

Please let me know if you have any questions.

guest login down

The guest login was down starting 7:30pm, Thursday, June 18.

Key for Cabinets in Printing Room

I'm working the 6-9 shift and the key for the paper supply cabinets is not in the drawer, Cabinet #1. (It is 8:20pm now.)

Does anyone know where it is? Can we make sure it is always in the drawer?

[June 18 Update] The key is now on a small, silver, metal key chain. (It is no longer on the large wooden block.) It was found underneath the drawer organizer.

If the key is not in the locked cabinet #1, look in the unlocked drawer to the right. If you still don't see it, perhaps it is underneath the organizer.

FASB announces free webcast about upcoming Codification transition

The Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) has announced a free webcast on June 22, that will be archived, to help prepare for the upcoming transition July 1 to the Codification. This is a very major change. I would encourage you to watch it, either live or the archived version.

Elevators

A patron told me that the elevators will not stop on the 4th floor. I went and checked and was able to enter the elevator on the 4th floor (someone was exiting). But once inside, the elevator would stop at every floor except the fourth. It also stops at the third floor of the library, regardless of whether or not someone has pushed the button. Jennifer put in a work order so someone will come to look at it.

In the meantime, patrons unable to use the stairs might not be able to get to the fourth floor. They can be directed to circulation and can use their elevator.

Printing in the Summer

The BCTC Help Desk just assisted me in answering a question I wasn't sure about. A student taking a class only in the first summer session and not the second session asked if her printing account would still be available to her in the second session. The answer is no, it will end when the first summer session ends.

GIS Intern for the Summer

We have a GIS intern for the summer session. Originally from West Texas, Clint Newsom is currently working on his M.S. in Information at the University of Michigan and will be spending his summer here working on some census-related GIS projects. He took some GIS courses as part of his degree program and wanted the chance to test and expand his skills. He has a Master's in Anthropology, lots of web development experience, and some library experience working at the University of Austin in Texas.

Clint will be here all day on Mondays and Tuesdays and on Wednesday mornings - he's spending the other half of his week as an intern at the American Museum of Natural History. He'll be stationed in the Chief Librarians office suite on the 4th floor, and will be putting in a few hours a week at the reference desk. Please welcome Clint to Baruch!

Every Nasdaq Firm Gets a Report

That was the title of a story in today's Wall Street Journal. Nasdaq is teaming up with Morningstar to provide research profiles of every Nasdaq-listed company regardless of size. That means more than 3,600 companies. The reports will be 4 to 5 pages and consist of a company profile and data sheet. Morningstar will not provide earnings forecasts or make a buy/sell/hold recommendation.

Marc Antony's speech from Julius Caesar

A student came to the desk confused as she said her communications professor had said "Just Google It" for Marc Antony's speech. She knew it was Act 3, Scene 2 but she didn't know it is from Julius Caesar. It's quite famous...we did find print versions and we found it on Youtube.com.

What LibGuides Look Like

If you haven't heard yet, we are looking into using LibGuides to create subject guides. Here's a seven-minute video that gives an overview of the product.

LibGuides Intro from Springshare on Vimeo.

Elevators Out of Order

The elevators are not working this morning. Jerry said that the problem is being worked on and they may be back in service in a couple of hours. In the meantime, patrons unable to use the stairs should be referred to the circulation desk and can be escorted by their elevator upstairs.

Guest Login System Down This Morning

The guest login system has been mostly down all morning. As of 11:57 am, it's still down. The Help Desk gave me a ticket number for this: 116568.

Datastream Navigator Available Again

The Datastream Navigator (the tool for searching for the mnemonic codes for series within the application) is again available. [It was not available last week due to a change in the embedded url which Theresa and I just updated.]

Map of Manhattan from 1609

Connected to the 400th anniversary of the first European contact with the Hudson River and the area that now makes up New York City, the Wildlife Conservation Society has launched an amazing mapping system of Manhattan that gives you a glimpse of what the land probably looked like here at the time the first Europeans were arriving.

The Mannahatta Project allows you to enter in a street address and see what that location may have looked like in 1609. You can then click on the virtual thumbtack on the map and get a popup window (like this one for 151 E 25th St) that will detail:

• what wildlife probably lived there (common names and scientific names are provided)
• any uses of the land there by the Lenape
• what the topography was like
• what the area is like now (you get a link to the OASIS map for the location; here's the link provided for 151 E 25th St)

You can drag the map around on your screen, zoom in and out, and even overlay the modern street grid.

Full text list

Serials Solutions is experiencing some sort of problem and our Full Text list page has temporarily lost all its customization. This is happening to libraries across the country. The search functionality is working fine however.

Serials Solutions records in CUNY+

Because Serials Solutions has changed the format for sending their e-records, the central office has had to reload all electronic serials records. Therefore the current changes are not reflected in the records currently in CUNY+. This would be a problem if we have canceled a title or if it was dropped from a database. Please double check with the Full Text list (which is updated) if you find something that CUNY+ shows we have but does not work. As always, feel free to email me if something is strange.

Ebrary now allows exporting to RefWorks and EndNote

ebrary just announced the new feature added to the QuickView menu.

Users must go to My Settings on the top right, where they have a choice to allow for the RefWorks and/or EndNote buttons to appear. Once you do that, after you have a book open, click on InfoTools and you will see the option to export to those softwares.

This is a user-driven option, so each user has to do this for themselves.

WNYC's On the Media critiques two new search engines

WYNC’s On The Media featured a segment this weekend on search engines. The segment discusses two savvy search engines, Wolfram Alpha and Cuil, but also is a good commentary on the current state of Search. Danny Sullivan from searchengineland.com was interviewed.

• Wolfram Alpha
  Wolfram Alpha is a new search engine that functions more as an “answer machine” in that it specializes in finding statistical facts. Some sample searches that yielded seemingly correct answers:
  
  Marshmallow AND Calories
  Lake Superior AND Average Depth
  Afghanistan AND Population
  United States AND Trade Deficit
  Ford AND 2008 AND Revenue
  Distance AND Moon AND Earth
  
  Interesting and fun, but I think the manner in which it displays the results is lacking. It is not exactly clear where the information came from so there’s no way to gauge the validity and reliability the information. The “Sources” link leads you to the formulas that calculated the results.
  
• Cuil
  The article also discussed Cuil which indexes and crawls more pages than Google. Cuil’s results rely less on popularity of pages for search results and more on the presence of related words within the search page.

“Holy Grail 2.0.” On The Media. WNYC. May 15, 2009. http://www.onthemedia.org/transcripts/2009/05/15/03

Zotero

At today's Tech Sharecase, I demo'ed Zotero, an open source citation manager that works within the Firefox browser. If you want more info about Zotero, you may want to check out the LibGuide on Zotero that my friend Jason Puckett, a librarian at Georgia State University, put together for the students and faculty at his school.

If you do set up Zotero and set up your account to be saved on the web as well as on your computer, feel free to friend me in Zotero. Even if you don't set up Zotero, you can check out my library of citations (wkich I haven't really organized much into folders and subfolders yet).

Company History

At the last practicum we discussed an assignment about company histories. An entrepreneurship class has to find out about the history, management and strategy of a company before it went public. They need to answer the question: why did the company go public? To get the basic facts about who was the founder or CEO and when the company went public, the best source is the International Directory of Company Histories which is available in our reference collection (HD2721 .I54) and online in the Business and Company Resource Center. BCRC also includes Notable Corporate Chronologies.

Students that I worked with found the best information came from Business Source Premier using some creative searching. Interviews with the CEO’s had great information (Use the CEO’s name or ‘Executives’ and the subject term ‘Interviews’). You can also search BSP with the index term ‘Going Public (Securities).’

If the CEO was a well known figure (we were looking at Dave Thomas of Wendy’s) the Biography Reference Bank was useful since it had profiles from Current Biography and links to current articles. The Biography Resource Center includes Business Leader Profiles for Students which is simple but helpful for chronologies.