One of my students in LIB 1015 has asked to get a copy of his graded final project back. I’ve left it in an interoffice mail envelope at the reference desk, as my office on the 5th floor is hard to find and as I’ll be away on annual leave starting tomorrow (Tuesday, Dec. 21) and won’t be back until Monday, Jan. 3.
Year: 2010
Jewish Studies Source trial
We have a trial until the end of January to Jewish Studies Source, a new EBSCOhost database. It is listed in on our database page. Please share any feedback you may have on this resource.
JSTOR Current Scholarship Program
You may have heard that JSTOR has added current content to its holdings. They are calling it their Current Scholarship Program (CSP).
While JSTOR is offering many different subscription models to their CSP, what affects us at this time is the move from many smaller publishers to move their current content from their own platform to JSTOR’s.
There are a number of titles that we subscribe to as individual titles that are now going to be available on the JSTOR platform with current holdings. You can find a list of publishers involved here; most of our titles are coming from the University of Chicago Press and the University of California Press.
The platform changes will launch on January 1, 2011. I will be changing our links the first week of January.
Catalog Now Includes ICPSR Records
As announced on the Library News blog from the CUNY Office of Library Services, records for ICPSR items can now be found in the library catalog.
Want to add the feed for the Library News blog to Microsoft Outlook or some other feed reader? Here’s the URL for the feed: http://www1.cuny.edu/mu/library-news/feed/
NY Times Mapping America
A follow-up from my post from a few days ago – the NY Times has used the new 5 year 2005-2009 ACS data to build census tract level maps for the entire country. They’re great for viewing distributions and for identifying basic data for specific tracts, but you can’t download or capture anything:
http://projects.nytimes.com/census/2010/explorer?ref=us
(note – a census tract is a relatively permanent statistical entity created by the Census Bureau designed to have an ideal population between 1500 and 8000 people, with an ideal size of 4000)
New Edition of the Encyclopedia of New York City
Who says print reference is dead? Not this guy, who can’t wait to get his hands on the new edition of The Enyclopedia of New York City (Baruch’s in on order). In this interview, editor Kenneth Jackson talks about what’s new in the 2nd edition.
New ACS Census Data
The Census Bureau just released a new dataset as part of the American Community Survey. The new 5-year (2005-2009) American Community Survey (ACS) estimates provide data for all areas of the country; all counties and cities regardless of population size, and small areas such as census tracts (but no zip codes – ACS data won’t be provided at the zip code level).
Read the full press release here.
The 5 year estimates are best for small areas, like tracts, that aren’t available in the other series (3 year and 1 year estimates). For neighborhood level stats it’s still best to stick with the 3 year PUMA-level data via the neighborhood map in most cases. Updated estimates for the 3 year series will be available in January.
2010 Census data is still in the works; they should release preliminary stats for apportionment in another week or so.
Student Printing to Expire Dec. 21st
We’ve had many students asking how long it will be until their Fall 2010 printing allotment expires.
The BCTC helpdesk gave me this date.
Case Studies
I was wondering if anyone thinks there would be good reason for us to have a LibGuide about finding case studies. I am thinking of a guide that would cover all the disciplines in which case studies are common (business, medicine, psychology, etc.)
The guide could have info about how to find case studies in different subjects as well as info about restrictions on the Harvard Business School Press case studies. FWIW, after a student recently asked for help finding Harvard case studies, I directed her to look for other case studies in Business Source Complete. To help her, I made a screenshot to show her how to set up the search screen to limit the document type to “Case Study.”
So what about it? Should we do a LibGuide? What should be in it if we done?
Video Explaining the Housing Bubble
This video offers an interesting way to explain the housing bubble to students. The game-like graphics and the simplified narrative make this an engaging way to introduce the basic outline of the bubble narrative.