Reference at Newman Library

Year: 2009

Companies by number of employees

A patron wanted numbers of companies by employment size, by state. County Business Patterns – U.S. Census Bureau has this info.
Take a look at:
Number of Establishments by Employment Size
http://www.census.gov/econ/cbp/index.html
Choose a state.
Click on Compare —- Total to get state totals rather than a breakdown by industry.

Plunkett research online trial

We have a trial to Plunkett Research Online or PRO. I have attached information on the product.

It will run until 12/16/09 and is available on campus only.

Login URL: http://www.plunkettresearch.com/login.aspx

Plunkett Research Online provides industry analysis on 33 different industry sectors, including manufacturing.

Comments are appreciated. I am looking both for information on whether this fills a gap in our collection as well as its ease of use.

student assignment re MTA collection

FYI- A student who was helped at the reference desk Thursday night said that there is an extra credit paper that everyone in the class may do.  It is on comparing the Dow Theory to the Elliott wave theory.  She plans to use the MTA collection heavily and thought others would too.  These materials need to be paged, per the wiki entry on the MTA collection.

Legal materials added to Google Scholar

Resource Shelf covers the addition of legal materials to Google Scholar at http://www.resourceshelf.com/2009/11/17/federal-and-state-legal-opinions-along-with-patent-info-added-to-google-scholar/ .  The advanced search option allows targeted searching by jurisdiction and type of document (federal or state case, patent, article).   As noted by Resource Shelf, many  of these materials are already available on the web (Justia offers federal cases linked to Pacer dockets and there are several free sources for patents, including the U.S. Patent Office) but now  these materials are part of the Google Scholar database.   Google Scholar is also linking to materials (e.g. law review articles)  in propriety databases, including Lexis and HeinOnline.

SLA NY event Thursday in Conference Center and guest logins

On this Thursday, the SLA NY chapter is having an Information Forum in the conference center on the 7th floor.  It is one of the events of the SLA’s centennial celebration by the local chapter.  A member emailed me today that he would like to tweet at the conference and would access to the wireless network be available.  I asked Arthur, and he said it would be if the person obtained a guest log in at the reference desk.  So, I replied to the person this information and explained how to obtain a guest log in at the reference desk.   So far, I have had only one request.  The organizers of the event are referring questions to me.  (The person who plans to tweet is a student at Pratt and on the SLA NY Advisory Board.)  I thought I would let everyone know about this person’s inquiry and the response that I received.

Coming Changes to 360 Search

After sitting through a 30-minute presentation from Serials Solutions about the new release of 360 Search, I learned that  starting in mid to late December we should have the ability to do a few new things with Bearcat (which is powered by 360 Search) that weren’t possible before or that were harder to do before:

  • connect more databases to Bearcat that we couldn’t before
  • control (to a limited extent, I think) how individual databases are searched
  • customize subject clusters of databases ourselves (instead of having to send request to Serials Solutions asking them to do it for us)