Reference at Newman Library

Year: 2011

When Copy Cards Don’t Seem to Work

I learned a new fun fact yesterday from Annette while we were helping a student in the copy room: the card reader displays on the copiers (the ones that show how much money is on the card) show not two but three digits after the decimal point. So if a student puts in a copy card and the reader displays $.091 (as was the case yesterday), don’t make the mistake I made and think it means 91 cents; nope, it’s 9.1 cents.

When a copier is not being used, the LCD screen on it (the one that is nestled among the control buttons) says “Insert key card,” which really should say something like “Insert copy card.” If you insert a copy card with less than 10 cents on it (such as a card with $.091), the LCD display will continue to say “Insert key card” and no copies can be made.

It’s not clear if the vendor that maintains the copiers is going to be able to do anything about that third decimal place shown on card readers or the unhelpful “Insert key card” message on the copier’s LCD screen.

June ebrary deletes

As you may already know, every month ebrary sends new titles to the database and deletes some.

The June update is unusual in that 436 titles, a much larger number than usual, is being deleted, the majority of which is from Oxford University Press. Most are older titles. It is impossible for me to know if any of these titles were currently being used so I wanted to alert everyone about this event. The records have already been removed from the catalog. I have a list of them if interested.

We have also received a larger than usual number of new titles, 16,000 of them, that should be loaded by tomorrow.

New NYC Neighborhood Census Data

The NYC Department of City Planning has released new tables and maps based on the 2010 Census Redistricting data, which gives us basic counts of the population. The tables (in PDF and Excel format) are provided for the city, boroughs, individual census tracts, and new areas called Neighborhood Tabulation Areas (NTAs). Here’s their definition:

*Neighborhood Tabulation Areas (NTAs) are aggregations of census tracts that are subsets of New York City’s 55 Public Use Microdata Areas (PUMAs). Primarily due to these constraints, NTA boundaries and their associated names may not definitively represent neighborhoods.

There are 195 NTAs in the city – more manageable then the 2,168 census tracts (small areas with an ideal size of 4,000 people) and more precise than the 55 PUMAs (large areas with an ideal size of 100,000 people). It looks like the department may be trying to re-align and standardize how they’re going to report the new 2010 Census data with how they’ll be reporting the annually updated American Community Survey (the Census Bureau will probably report next year’s ACS using updated 2010 Census boundaries). The city provides cross-tabs that you can use if you wanted to aggregate tract-level data to NTAs on your own, and helpful maps that show you where the NTAs are.

All of these geographies nest within each other: census tracts -> NTAs -> PUMAs -> Boroughs -> City. The city hasn’t said whether or how they’ll report data for the Community Districts; it seems likely that they will, since the CDs were established by city law. The 59 CDs were also constructed by aggregating census tracts and they are similar in size to PUMAs, but they don’t align well with the PUMA boundaries.

It’s likely that the city will release more tables and maps once the complete 2010 census data for Summary File 1 is released this summer.