Reference at Newman Library

Year: 2011

Report that Prof. Carmichael’s students need

Accounting students of Prof. Carmichael need the Missal Final Report regarding the New Century Financial Bankruptcy Investigation.  The report, more than 500 pages, is posted on the website of the law firm in which Missal is a partner. I located it with a Google search, missal final report new century.  There are articles on ABI/Inform, Business Source Complete and Factiva relating to the report and its impact.

New Century Financial restated some financial statements, filed for bankruptcy and emerged from it.  Audit Analytics has some information and the SEC filings may be located on the SEC website.  (Some databases remove filings of bankrupt companies and also remove the original filing after a restatement.)

bX Recommender Trial Starting April 29

We mentioned the bxRecommender trial a while ago.

The trial will in fact start this Friday, April 29 and will last 60 days.

Some additional information:

bX Recommender is a service from Ex Libris which generates usage-based recommendations for related scholarly materials. (Recommendations appear below Find it! menu links, similar to Amazon’s “Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought”). Ex Libris mines customers’ SFX log files, which is data largely unique to academic libraries, to build a data set processed with analytic tools and to develop the recommendations found in the bX Recommender service.

While the data is aggregated from actual searches, this process is anonymized to protect end user and institutional confidentiality.

Users at CUNY campus libraries will view all recommendations available through the bX Recommender service, both those the institution has in full-text and others we may not.

Please encourage end-users to test it out and let me know what they and you think.

Definitions of terms used in Edgar Online I-Metrix

I asked Edgar Online I-Metrix what “cross calculated” meant in their financials of companies, and this is what I learned:

a.       Original – This  is as the word says original data for the period.

b.      Amended – Company updated the financials of a recently filed period by filing a 10Q/A or 10K/A

c.       Preliminary – Data coming from 8K

d.      Restated – This is flagged when a company updated financials for a historical period in a more recent filing.

e.      Cross Calculated – More than one document is used to generate a particular period number. This is mostly the case with Cash flow statements for the 2nd, 3rd and 4th Qtrs as companies only report YTD numbers.

I hope this is helpful.  Rita

New Interface for Euromonitor Passport GMID

Very discretely (maybe too discretely) Euromonitor went live with a new interface for Passport GMID yesterday. There is a video overview of the new interface that may be worth checking out (if only for the comedic value of hearing “GMID” said as a word, “gee-mid” instead of a sequence of individual letters).

Statistical Abstract Discontinued?

One of the librarians on the MAPS-L Listserv posted a response to a question he had sent to the US Census Bureau regarding the fate of the Statistical Abstract. It doesn’t look good, unless Congress acts to re-instate it. This is the response from the Branch Chief, Statistical Compendia Branch, ACSD US Census Bureau:

“The President’s FY 2012 Budget terminates the Statistical Abstract including all of its components. The statistical compendia branch program consists of the Statistical Abstract of the United States and its supplemental products: USA Counties, State and Metropolitan Area Data Book, County and City Data Book, State and County Quick Facts, and MapStats.

Given the current budget environment , the Census Bureau made difficult choices to terminate and reduce a number of existing programs in order to acquire funds for higher priority programs.

Final decisions about the FY 2012 budget are the responsibility of the Congress”

Trial to Latin American Weekly Report

We have a CUNY-wide trial to the Latin American Weekly Report until the end of May. Access is on-campus only.

The LatinNews Intelligence Service covers 33 Latin American and Caribbean countries and cover political, security, economic and strategic issues. Information goes back to 1967.

Perhaps the best part of this trial is the access to the Latin American Weekly Report – this is the authoritative, weekly, in depth analysis of political, strategic and key economic developments throughout the region.

It was eagerly awaited by all Latin Americanists when I was in graduate school, and kept in these big binders by the reference desk.

I am interested in your views on whether this would be a useful resource at Baruch. Please share below or email me.

Command Code Searching the Catalog for Collections

In response to a question asked the desk today from a student who wanted to browse the titles in the MTA Collection, Jin and I figured out use the command codes to find all the items from a collection:

  1. In the catalog, click “Command Search”
  2. Use the code, WCL, to find words in the name of a collection; to find all the MTA books, type in WCL=MTA

There are other commands you can use that work all sorts of wonders.