Year: 2010

A student reported that the hand dryer in the men’s room on the 2nd floor is running continuously and can’t be stopped.  So I placed a work request order, number 31398 about it tonight.  Rita

On Saturday, at a student’s request, I placed a work order, 31147, for new tube lights in the graduate student carrels on the 4th floor as the student said they were burned out.

FINRA, the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, last week released several new upgrades to their  free  Fund Analyzer tool, which enables  comparisons of up to three mutual funds or exchange-traded funds side-by-side and evaluate the impact of fees and expenses over time . Using the new Fund Screener, one can  search more than 23,000 funds and ETFs on nine key criteria, making the task of finding funds that meet investors’ objectives quicker and easier. The new Annual Expense Comparison illustrates how a fund’s expense ratio stacks up against an industry average of similar funds. Other new features include one-click access to a fund’s prospectus and other disclosure documents, a PDF report that may be printed or saved and a “Share This” function to send the report to others.

At the end of last week, it became clear that the research consultation signup system was not working properly. Typically, after a student fills out the online form to request an appointment, the student is presented with new web page confirming the submission the request. At the moment, if a student fills out the form and clicks “send,” a new pages tries to load. After a long while, a page will load, but instead of the page that lets the student know that the request has been received and that a response will come shortly, the student sees a blank page.

The other piece of the system that is broken at the moment is the automated email notifications I get each time a request form is submitted. I now have to log in to the backend of the system each day and scan the table of submissions to see if there are any new ones.

Saad Abulhab and Wilcina Longdon are working on a fix to both of these problems. In the meanwhile, please report to me any comments or feedback you get from students trying to request appointments with us.

The Brookings Institute recently published a State of Metropolitan America Report with some interactive maps of data.

I’ve created a Google Map that makes it much easier for students to find and access neighborhood profiles for census data. You can click on a neighborhood to identify it or you can click on the neighborhood name in the legend (you need to view the full map in a separate window to see the legend) to find it. Once a neighborhood is selected, you can click a link that opens the latest profile for this area from the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey 3 year estimates (currently data from 2006-2008).

I’ve embedded it in this blog – but you can also access it from the NYC Data LibGuide that I created from the Neighborhoods tab. For a full-sized view of the map in a new window, click the View a Larger Map link that appears below the map.

View Larger Map

The map shows the location of the 55 public use microdata areas (PUMAs) for the city. PUMAs are census statistical areas that approximate neighborhoods and are identified by a 5 digit number. The city and the census bureau have assigned neighborhood names to all of these areas, but you can’t use these names to directly search for data at the census bureau site; you need to know the PUMA number. This finding aid ties everything together – PUMA numbers, their neighborhood name, the location and boundaries of the area, underlying place names and features, and direct links to the profiles.

I’ll be updating this map each fall when new data is released.

Thanks to Michael, I have a WestlawNext trial password that expires tomorrow.  I have been experimenting with the new platform and find it to be much cleaner and easier to use than the old one. TRL (Thompson Reuters Legal) is attempting to get away from the old “choose a database, formulate a search” method, and sophisticated search algorithms are meant to facilitate Google-style searching. This seems to work well for simple searches: a search for Roe v. Wade retrieves only one case instead of the five that used to appear on WL Academic. But most librarians will want to use Boolean search, which is still available on WestlawNext. Unfortunately, it’s not easy to find, and the instructions for field searching (a search by judge’s name, for example) have not yet been included. Many law firm librarians are concerned about the pricing. Both time-based and transactional billing are available, but transactional searches will include a charge for the search and a new “view” charge per document opened. Additional charges apply for printing and emailing documents. Documents viewed and stored to a folder, however, may be retrieved later at no additional charge. Please let me know by tomorrow if you would like to see WestlawNext.

Content

• Thousands of polls from sources such as major network news organizations (ABC, CBS, NBC, etc.); major newspapers (New York Times, etc.); higher ed (Quinnipiac College, etc.); polling orgs and research institutes (Gallup, Pew Research Center, etc.); trade associations; non-profit organizations; etc.
• When you view an individual poll, you can generate a graph of the results (which are downloaded to your computer as a CSV file that can be opened in Excel).

Navigation

• Search by topic (from an overly long drop down list); full-text search; geography (another overly-long drop down list); date range; source (another overly-long drop down list); Results (I don’t think users will easily figure out how this differs from the topic list).
• You can change the search interface above to one that has no drop down lists but instead search boxes for each field
• Full text searching vs. Results searching (results are the answers or polling options presented to the poll respondents) are odd. I’m not sure if the Results index is part of the larger Full Text index; it doesn’t appear to be. I searched in Results for “filtering” and found a poll from a 1999 Wirthlin Report that included “filtering” in the answer choices for the poll.  When I did a full text search for “filtering,” I was unable to find that same report. So it would seem that the full text index does not include the words in the results index (unless this one search I did was an anomaly).
• When you view a poll, you see most of the fielded data except for the “Topics” field, which is too bad, as that would help users understand how the topics index works and make navigation of the system more apparent to the user (much as subject headings/descriptors in a database can help with this).

Sharing and Linking

• Each poll has a stable URL that can be copied from the address window in your browser.

My Take

• Polling data is something we are frequently asked for at the desk. Without a tool like this, finding that content is difficult. I don’t know how comprehensive it is including every poll from the leading polling organizations, though.
• The graphing feature is a real plus for students who ask us for charts or graphs of information.
• If the subscription is under $2000-$3000, I’d say we should find a way to get it.

We recently got a trial to Ethnographic Video Online, which is a product from Alexander Street Press.

Content

• There are transcripts for each video. When you watch the video, you can have the transcript displayed next to it. As the video plays, portions of the transcripted are highlighted in yellow so you can see where you are.
• If you go to full screen mode, the videos look somewhat pixellated.
• The scope of the content seems broad (wide range of geographic locations and cultural groups represented).

Navigation

• Users must first register (create their own free account)
• There is lots of metadata for each film
• Advanced search lets you search by transcripts and subtitles; title and series; ethnographer; date; publisher; recording location; language; subjects; persons discussed; and cultural groups
• Browse by ethnographer, geographic location, cultural group, subjects, people, and content type
• If you are viewing a transcript, you can click on a sentence and navigate the video to that portion of the film (I love this feature)
• Each video is broken up into a series of clips so you can jump ahead to specific scenes
• You can make your own collection of clips from different movies
• You can make and save your own playlists.

Sharing and Linking

• There are embed codes for each video. When I tried to use one of those codes to embed a video in this blog post, I got an error message in my browser, “A script in this movie is causing Adobe Flash Player 10 to run slowly. If it continues to run, your computer may become unresponsive. Do you want to abort the script?”
• Each video has a stable URL; each clip within a video also has a stable URL (this isn’t the case with the videos from Films and Demand)

My Take

• The content is of really high quality and navigation to it is top-notch.
• I don’t know what the demand is for such a product, but I’m very impressed by the database overall.

I took at a quick look at Films on Demand, a video service that Mike recently set up a trial for. Here are some quick thoughts:

Content

• The trial version seems to contain just a subset of the total collection of videos available to subscribers, making it hard to judge the scope of the contents.
• Each video is broken up into segments. You can watch the whole video straight through or go straight to a segment (each segment has a title, run time, and description).

Navigation

• You can search against the metadata for the videos (title, subject, producer, date, and words in the description) or you can browse by broad subjects and drill down
• Each video has a “related videos” tab (much like YouTube) that can lead you to similar content
• You can create playlists or save favorites (I didn’t try this)

Sharing and Linking

• There are stable URLs for each film but there doesn’t seem to be a stable URL for each segment (which would be a nice thing to have if you want to link straight to a specific section of film).
• There is no way to embed videos that I could see. Users must watch all films on the Films on Demand website. It would be great if videos could be embedded on course blogs, in Blackboard, etc. (someone would have to figure out how to make the embedded video only playable after the user has authenticated in some way).

My Take

• We clearly need to think about ways to bring more video content to our students and faculty. They’re asking for it often and, as a communication format, video is becoming increasingly important.
• I don’t know if the kind of video content that students ask for at reference desk can be found in this database, though (offhand, I can’t recall the exact topics that students hope to find videos for, but they tend to be related to business communications issues). The trial version we have suggests that there may be many business videos (the subject page for “Business and Economics” videos is pretty granular in subtopics) but we can only see in this trial ten of the videos in this category.
• With each passing day, there is more and more video content freely available online. Finding what you want, though, remains a challenge, as searchable metadata for videos in YouTube, Vimeo, etc. is pretty limited. Films on Demand does make the videos more easily found via a simple subject category system and by extensive annotations for all video content. We could subscribe to this database (no word on costs) or we could just try to get better at finding relevant video content that is freely online (and perhaps curating those finds on LibGuides).
• Bottom line: what would be the cost for this service? If it’s too high ($3000 or more a year) then maybe we should focus on improving our abilities to find and curate free video content.