Year: 2009

Saad Abulhab sent this out on LIBDL today and gave me permission to republish here.

It was brought to my attention that four student printers had a handwritten “out of order sign” placed on them last Friday. Please do not place any “out of order” signs without informing library systems staff first. If you must place a sign in some rare occasion, please let us know ASAP. Here is the procedure on handling problems on student printers:

• Changing “toners” or replacing “Maintenance kit” messages should be reported promptly to library systems staff during weekdays, and to BCTC help desk at night and weekends. Such problems can either be addressed shortly or within the next possible time.
• Paper Jams should be reported to systems staff or Alfredo during weekdays, and to BCTC helpdesk during nights and weekends.
• Paper refills are handled regularly by Alfredo and systems staff during weekdays, but should be handled by librarians, if no student helper from systems is scheduled, during weekends. The key is placed in the drawer. Please let us know if you need any training.

Since we have 10 printers now, students should be encouraged to use an alternative printer, not sent upstairs to complain to BCTC helpdesk. A brief servicing interruption on a printer or two should not affect our operation, as it did in the past.

Thanks for Prof. John Goering we have access to Property Shark which has real estate data.

It is available only at 2 of the reference computers, and needs a login, which is in the wiki.

His students have been told to come to the reference desk to use the database.

Last Thursday the Human Resources Council and Center for Nonprofit Strategy and Management at Baruch College presented a forum, called The Helpers Need Help: New York City’s Nonprofit Human Service Organizations Persevering in Uncertain Times.  The report has been getting a lot of media attention, including the following, which has  a link to the full report:http://www.humanservicescouncil.org/ , which can be downloaded.

Today’s NYT has an interesting story “At Festival, A Splash from Michael Moore but Cautions on Documentaries” (headline of print edition).   The story mentions a new report from the Center for Social Media at American University, “Honest Truths: Documentary Filmmakers on Ethical Challenges in Their Work.”

From an information literacy viewpoint, as a librarian I found the article’s references to the report, based on interviews of documentary filmmakers, indicating that manipulation of “individual facts, sequences and meanings of images” if that might help viewers to grasp the documentary’s “higher truth” very interesting.  I took a brief look at the full report and plan to read all of it.

It has been removed from the list of databases.

A current student assignment is to write about an industry or activity that could foster growth of the U.S. economy.  One source you might point out to students is our Recession Resources guide, especially the “News & Updates” pages which cover the government response to the financial crisis. The White House does a nice job of covering the Economy in one of their Issues pages.

You can read more about the Recession Resources guide in an interview with Jean Yaremchuk that appeared in the last issue of The Ticker.