Reference at Newman Library

Year: 2010

BPL5100 – Business Policy

Harry and I have met with several of the first summer session BPL5100 sections. Here is a list of some of the industries that have been assigned for the team presentations:

  • Beer
  • Biotechnology
  • Coal
  • Electric Utilities
  • Funeral Homes
  • Gaming
  • Life Insurance
  • Lodging
  • Pharmaceuticals
  •  Pipelines
  • Railroads
  • Toys and Games
  • Waste Management

Most of these industries are covered in the Standard & Poor’s Industry Surveys. Others like toys and the funeral home industry can be found in Ibisworld. (Our trial runs through the end of the month.)  Government websites are good for coal and railroads and electric utilities. The Oil & Gas Journal is the key source for the pipelines industry.

Students need to include both a SWOT analysis and a Porter analysis in their presentations. Several of the classes have been encouraged to recommend international companies for investment. You should be seeing many of these students at the reference desk as the presentations are due the week of June 27th.

“Copyright Provisions in Law Journal Publication Agreements”

This may be of interest:  a  recent article in Law Library Journal examines the copyright provisions of law journal publication agreements and makes certain recommendations for journals and librarian / authors. 

Keele, Benjamin J. “Copyright Provisions in Law Journal Publication Agreements.” Law Library Journal 102.2 (2010): 269-283. Library, Information Science & Technology Abstracts with Full Text. EBSCO. Web. 8 June 2010.

 (Link to article on EbscoHost)

Summer Printing

As is the case at the start of each semester, we’ve been getting a number of students reporting that they’re getting a message saying “login failed” when they try to get a print job out of a student printer. This problem can occur for a number of reasons:

  • The student isn’t taking a class right now. Many students don’t realize that they don’t have a printing account when they are not enrolled. Many also be under the mistaken impression that they can carry over a printing account balance from the previous semester.
  • The student registered late.
  • The student hasn’t paid their bill yet.
  • The student has got their Baruch username or password wrong. Have them confirm their username on this page from BCTC.
  • The student has their password wrong. Unless they’ve changed the password at some point, there is a good chance it’s still their PIN (i.e., their birthday in the YYMMDD format).

If the student is definitely enrolled right now, you can refer the student to the BCTC Help Desk for further assistance.

The printing accounts for the summer are set at $30 (which comes about to 250 printouts).

The CDO Meltdown

Linda E. shared a blog post with me that you might find interesting. Michael Lewis, the author of Liar’s Poker and the recently published, The Big Short, praised the research of a Harvard undergraduate who wrote her thesis on the market for subprime mortgage-backed CDOs. The thesis is now on the reading list of a Harvard course on the financial crisis.

Improving Wikipedia

At last week’s Tech Sharecase in a discussion of Chemspider, a search engine that addresses the  problem of finding reliable information on chemical structures on the web, Stephen mentioned that the team that built ChemSpider organized a group of scientists to review and authenticate all the Wikipedia articles on chemical structures and add new entries for structures that were not available.

Chemists aren’t the only group of scientists who are working on the Wikipedia. A recent blog in Science magazine mentioned that the Society for Neuroscience (SfN) is asking its members to edit the Wikipedia as a form of public outreach.

The Wikimedia Foundation itself is starting an initiative to improve the quality of the site. In a recent press release they announced that they will will recruit Wikipedia volunteers to work with public policy professors and students to identify topic areas for improvement.