price histories

Can anyone lead me to sources for NYC price histories from the late 70s -- early 80s.
Thanks,
Paul

New FARS CD for 2007 has arrived

The 2007 Financial Accounting Research System (FARS) CDs from the FARS have arrived.
Two will be kept at the reference desk and used in the reference desk computers.
The other is available in reserve for one day loan.

I will check with Saad to make certain that the CD works on the reference desk computers. (Administrative rights are needed for the initial installation.)

The same literature that may be searched on the FARS CD (current as of Sept. 1, 2007) may be searched on CCH Accounting Research Manager and RIA Checkpoint-Accting, Auditing & Corporate Finance. The CCH and RIA databases are update daily.

Rita

Accessing GIS Software

Following the Intro to GIS Presentation, I received a few questions about how to get GIS software. Here are some answers:

1. CUNY has a site license with ESRI, the makers of ArcGIS. You can put in an IT Help Desk ticket and request to have ArcGIS installed on your machine. You can then sign-up for one of the free online courses to learn how to use it. I would suggest the The 15-Minute Map: Creating a Basic Map in ArcMap, if you just want to get your feet wet.

2. If you're not up to getting the full ArcGIS, with everything and the kitchen sink, you can try downloading ArcExplorer, which is a free, light-weight data viewer and mapping application made by ESRI. Since this is an application, you will need administrative permissions in order to install it at work. You could try it at home if you have a Windows operating system.

3. If you're a Mac or Linux user (or a Windows user who wants to try a non-ESRI product), you can try Quantum GIS (or QGIS for short). It is a free, open source, and relatively simple GIS program. You can work with many of the same datasets (shapefiles, imagery, etc) that you can use in ArcGIS.

Check out the GIS Subject Guide for places to download data to use with these GIS programs.

Happy mapping!

- Frank

Standard & Poor's Industry in Focus: The Future of E-books

While searching Standard & Poors NetAdvantage, I noticed the Industry in Focus is the Future of e-books.
Rita

Specifically nonspecific searching in ABI

Librarian Donna Slawsky pointed out an interesting search function in ABI Inform that allows you to search for articles related to companies without having to actually name one.

This comes in handy when a student asks: "I'm looking for case studies about how companies handle the training and development of their employees," but the student doesn't have a particular company they want to focus on.

Rather than just searching "training and development" by subject and wading through lots of theoretical articles about training and development, you can find articles about cases of actual training and development occuring in real companies.

Use ABI's classification codes to do this. The codes are toward the bottom of the search screen. To browse these codes, click on the hyperlink that says "Classification Codes." Next, drill-down to the section called "Document Treatment."

Here you can pick the classification code "Company Specific" (9110), as well as a number of other codes to help you get as specifically unspecific as your heart desires.

In any case, thanks to Donna for pointing this out.

Ebrary

It's Sunday and Ebrary is down. I have notified Mike.

Printer problems at the reference desk_problems fixed

I have put in a help desk request that at the present time it appears only the computer on the right side of the ref desk (as you face out) is sending things to the printer and a print results.
Printing guest log ins from the left computer, or anything else, is not working.

The problems have been fixed. Rita

National Academies Free Online Books and Podcasts

You may want to view the free online books and podcasts (Sounds of Science podcasts) available from the National Academies site. They cover current issues and topics and could be great resources for students, especially in COM 1010 or ENG 2100. You can search the site or browse by subject areas. Some example books/podcasts that may be of interest to librarians:

• Engaging Privacy and Information Technology in a Digital Age (book)
• None of Your Business: Privacy in the Information Age (podcast)
• Learning to think Spatially: GIS as a Support System in the K-12 Curriculum (book and podcast)
• Who Goes There?: Athentication Through the Lens of Privacy (book only)

Some books have a price, but don't worry, you can also read them for free. (Either look for the icon in the shape of an eye that says "Read Free Online", or click on the book title and scroll down the record until you see the "Read" section and click on "Fulltext" to access by chapter.)

The site also includes the coding to include the book on your site (just cut and paste the code). This is great for instructors that want to imbed the book on a site. Just find the book image that says "Display this book on your site".

-Linda

About Prof. Nurnberg's accounting assignment using FARS (or equivalent databases)

Accountancy professor Hugo Nurnberg distributed a two- part assignment to his upper level accounting class this week in which they are to use the Financial Accounting Standard Poor's FARS CD (available at the reference desk) or the RIA Checkpoint or CCH Accounting Research Manager databases.

I have discovered that the 2007 FARS CD has not yet arrived (it was released later than usual) so I would encourage you to suggest to the students to search RIA Checkpoint or CCH Accounting Research Manager. I don't know if the answer to the assignment is so timely that the 2006 FARS CD would not have the most up-to-date information that would be correct, but the RIA Checkpoint and CCH Accounting Research Manager are updated daily.

Prof. Nurnberg put on his Blackboard site the tutorials and handouts that have been developed to help students search this literature. If the students have not yet looked at these handouts before they try to search, please suggest that they do so. (One student told me that she didn't think it mattered what she searched. I learned she had not looked at the handouts, and I encouraged her to do so.)

Prof. Nurnberg encourages the students to consult background information, such as the Miller GAAP Guide. On Lexis-Nexis this is now referred to GAAP Levels A, B, C, D. The easiest way to locate it is to search "GAAP" in Sources, and look for it. Some of the interpretative literature on CCH's Accounting Research Manager is labeled "Miller Interpretations," which I am assuming is based on the Miller GAAP Guide, although I couldn't find anything in the database stating that.

Please let me know if you have any questions.

Thanks, Rita

Tips for Research assignment for Tax 9863

Darryl Steinberg, who teachers Tax 9863, Principles of Federal Income Taxation, is assigning his 85 graduate students to do research papers on one of the following three topics:






Homeland Reinvestment Act : Section 965
Limitation on Tax Deduction for Executive Compensation over $1M: 162(m)



Comparison of US Current Federal Income Tax System, Flat Tax Proposal and National Sales Tax.



I did a brief presentation of the tax related resources last night. These topics, he said, will be covered more in the secondary resources-journals, policy studies, law review articles, the WSJ, etc. I provided the students with an extensive handout. I also posted it on the shared Numan drive under the IS Division, Instruction, Instructional Materials and the folder Class Assignments.

Steinberg, who is the tax counsel for Lehman Brothers, told the students he thought CCH Tax Research Network was used by practioners more for the primary materials and RIA Checkpoint for the secondary materials and commentary and analysis.


To give you some heads up, the Homeland Reinvestment Act, section 965, was part of the American Jobs Creation Act of 2004, also known as Pub. Law. 108-357. This is a brief explanation of the IRS Code section 965:
As part of the American Jobs Creation Act of 2004 (Pub. L. 108-357), Congress provided U.S. multinational corporations with a temporary reduction in the U.S. tax imposed on certain dividends repatriated from their foreign subsidiaries. The stated reason for the tax benefit
was to stimulate the U.S. economy by triggering the repatriation of foreign earnings that would otherwise have remained abroad.



Relating to the executive compensation topic, in general:

For purposes of both the regular tax and alternative minimum tax, a publicly held corporation cannot deduct compensation (remuneration) to a covered employee to the extent the compensation exceeds $1 million per tax year (Reg. §1.162-27 There are some exceptions, explained in the code, cases and commentaries. One of the exceptions includes "golden parachutes." There is a division of opinion on whether this deduction should be increased or decreased, and policy questions in general about the deduction.

For the third, about the present U.S. federal tax system, and alternatives such as a national sales tax or a flat tax, there are many articles and studies on these alternatives. (These alternatives were proposed in a study prepared for President Bush that was done in 2005 by the President's Advisory Panel on Federal Tax Reform.

In the indexing of articles in ABI Inform Global, alternative names for a national sales tax are VAT (value added tax) and consumption tax.

The Congressional Research Reports, available on CCH Tax Research Network, have a number of studies on these topics. Other studies may be found in CIAO, NBER and SSRN. The tax treatises on RIA had information on these topics also. These taxes have been considered in other nations, and some countries have enacted them. The European Union has a VAT tax.
International tax treaties are available through the CCH database.

These topics all have many different stakeholders so there should be a wealth of research available.

Please let me know if you have any questions. The students just received the assignment and they will be working on the papers that are due at the end of the semester.

Congressional Research Reports 2003-2007 available in CCH Tax Resources Network

In preparing for a workshop, I discovered that the full-text of Congressional Research Reports 2003-2007, and other reports, relating to a broad range of present, or proposed, federal tax policies on business issues (compensation of executives, incorporating or doing business outside the U.S., flat tax, or national sales tax) are now available on CCH Tax Resource Network.



Click on the Federal Taxation tab, scroll and look in the Tax Legislation section, and the CRS Reports and other studies are listed in the right column. There are 12 pages of reports, arranged by date issued.



Jin wrote about the Congressional Research Reports earlier this year. They can be a valuable research source.

Database slowness

I am not sure if this is affecting any of our databases, but if a database is very slow it could be that they it is going through the California area that is burning. RefWorks seems to be affected based on the traffic on the RefWork list, but there may be others.

Should Surveyor Client be on my computer?

When I started my computer this morning, Surveyor Client was downloaded. Should it be?
If I should have it, could someone explain why? Thanks, Rita

WorldCat Collection Analysis call numbers

Thanks to Brian who found out that if you mouse over a category after expanding it, you will get a little window with the LC and Dewey corresponding.

New Link to GIS Course Page

Some have suggested (rightly so) that the link to the free ESRI GIS courses that I posted previously seems buried within the geography subject guide. So, a link to the course info has now been added to the library services page to increase the visibility of this resource.

Video on the information revolution

Thanks to a post by Nicole Engard, a librarian who blogs at What I Learned Today (you may have met her at Library Camp last August), I learned that the Kansas State University professor who made the video I mentioned earlier today also made a few others worth checking out:

Information R/evolution


The Machine is Us/ing Us


There's a nice little library of videos about the quickening pace of technology and how it is affecting the world on the Moving Forward site.

Forrester site offers some free research reports

For a lecture I did yesterday for some MBA students in CAPS, I was asked by the professor,prior to the session, if the library had access to research from Forrester. (A NYT article that the class was assigned referenced a Forrester Research report on computer game playing in companies.) I learned that the Forrester web site offers some free studies. A free individual registration is needed. The site had some free current reports on social networking and marketing, which the students were also assigned. Gartner and FAITS were also helpful.

Preview new home page for NYPL

A post on the NYPL Labs blog offers a screenshot of the home page that will go live sometime soon.

Reference Desk Computers

I have notified Systems that the computers at the reference desk are continually being hijacked by some program that wipes out all our library links and installs MSN as the default screen. This may have had something to do with the problem Paul reported about access to SDC last night.

Using Ref. Desk Referral Form in Class Lectures

I decided to use the Reference Desk Referral Form as a handout for a few class lectures (ENG 2100, SOC 4900, ANT 3085). Instead of giving students a handout listing databases and etc., I thought they could write down the database names and what they are used for as a reinforcement technique. Also, I found explaining the handout and how to use it has helped with demonstrating the research process. It was encouraging to see the students use the keywords grid while doing a class exercise and on their own during the hands-on time. I received positive feedback about the form from instructors as well. One even asked if she could have an electronic version so she could use it for future classes.