Year: 2010

Ellen Kaufman published a really helpful new LibGuide recently on copyright. It’s got a bunch of great links that are probably just as useful for us as they are for our students.

Thanks to a nice post by Wayne Bivens-Tatum at Academic Librarian, “The Timing of the Research Question,” I ran across a really interesting article by a librarian and a writing professor that identifies the points of disconnect between librarians and freshman composition faculty over when a student should have developed a research question:

Nutefall, Jennifer E. and Phyllis Mentzell Ryder. “The Timing of the Research Question: First-Year Writing Faculty and Instruction Librarians’ Differing Perspectives.” portal: Libraries and the Academy 10.4 (2010): 437-449. Project MUSE. Web. 2 Dec. 2010. [link]

One of the takeaways is that librarians want students to develop a question earlier in the research process than writing instructors typically do. It is suggested that librarians and writing faculty have more explicit discussions about this issue and how it affects the work they need to do with students in their respective arenas (workshops and reference service points for the librarians and classrooms for the the writing faculty).

We now have trial access to IGI Global (available only on campus), which offers entries from handbooks and encyclopedias as well as book chapters on all manner of IT and information science topics. Any feedback you have can be added here as a comment to this post.

On the WRDS platform, we now have access to OptionMetrics, a database that provides data on option prices.

The new version of Microsoft Outlook that we now have on our desktops allow us to subscribe to blogs and have new posts show up within Outlook. There are a couple of ways to add blog subscriptions to Outlook. The first way is to add the URL for the feed–the feed for any blog has a unique web address–into Microsoft Outlook. The second way, which I’ll demonstrate in the video below, lets you add more than one blog subscription at a time; the second way requires that someone has created a special file, called an OPML file, that bundles together the URLs for more than one blog feed.

I’ve created an OPML file that bundles together four feeds: all the posts in the reference blog, all the comments in the reference blog, all the posts in the Idea Lab blog, and all the comments in the Idea Lab blog. The OPML file I made can be downloaded from the “Blogs” page in the reference wiki and then imported into Microsoft Outlook. This video shows you how.

An article in Crain’s New York Business, Can New York Afford Its Higher Education, quotes President Wallerstein and has several references to Baruch and CUNY.

In case you didn’t see Arthur Downing’s email message yesterday, I’m republishing it here with his permission:

Due to essential work on the electrical system in the Newman Vertical Campus computer room, the campus network and all local Baruch College computer systems will be unavailable on Friday, November 26 from 9:00 a.m. until 1:00 p.m. There will be no access to faculty/staff e-mail, Baruch College web pages, the wireless network, or Degreeworks from on-site or off-site.

Please note that within the Newman Vertical Campus building ONLY, there will be no telephone service during this period. Telephone service in the Library building and South Campus will not be affected.

From off campus there will be access to systems that are hosted outside the Baruch network, such as Blackboard, eSIMS, BOSS, and student e-mail.

Blackboard, eSIMS, and ePermit are available via the CUNY Portal http://www.cuny.edu/
Student Email – Live @ Baruch http://mail.live.com

Graduate tax students in Tax 9862 (Prof. Egan) and 9863 (Prof. Korman) have group assignments that they are working on.  I have posted in the Subject Guides guides for the two classes.  (There is a link to the handout I had prepared for Prof. Korman’s class and one for Prof. Egan’s class from last semester that has some screen shots.)

Prof. Egan’s students will either be representing the IRS or a taxpayer who is being audited.  The taxpayer, a university professor who teaches the history of theatre, begins writing plays and is audited after three years as her expenses are greater than her income as a playwright.  The issues include whether the professor is engaged in a business or a hobby.  Searching CCH Intelliconnect, limited to federal taxation, and RIA Checkpoint should enable the students to find the cases that they need.  Calarco v.  Commissioner is factually probably the closest case to the facts that the students are dealing with.  The judge makes references to the 5,000 years of theatre productions dealing with tax problems, and references to Shakespeare in the opinion, which is interesting to read.

Prof. Korman’s students are considering whether strike benefits (money payments, food, etc.) are gifts or taxable income under different factual situations (one being a union member, another a non-union member whose has suffered due to a strike).   Searching RIA Checkpoint or CCH Intelliconnect for cases, and IRS rulings and publications should help the students find the answers.   There are some articles on ABI Inform Global too that address these questions.  I have done presentations to both classes so I hope that most students will be able to find the materials.  (strike benefits and gift or taxable are possible keywords to use.)