Reference at Newman Library

Year: 2011

Patron-driven acquisition at Baruch

The Newman Library has started a patron-driven acquisition experiment with about 2,700 books from Coutts’ MyILibrary. The records for these books were carefully selected according to subject matter, publishers, years of publication, price and other variables to give us a current list of titles we do not own but that might be of interest to our users. A purchase is triggered the second time someone looks at the e-book.

How does this work? A user finds an e-book they are interested in in the catalog. They’ll click on the link which will take them to MyILibrary where they will see a Summary page with title and citation information, a brief summary, and a table of contents. This is free viewing. If they go on and take a look inside the book, this will count as a view, whether they look at it for 10 seconds or read the entire e-book. After a second view, the e-book is automatically purchased, and we will own it.

Every month new titles will be added and older ones removed. I will have access to the usage statistics.

The records for these titles have been added to the catalog but they look exactly like any other e-book record, and for obvious reasons, I cannot give an example to look at.

This is just one small part of our total monographic acquisition. It is not intended to replace our regular ordering procedures, but to supplement it.

It is hoped that this will alert us to gaps we might have in our collection, give users the ability to access immediately material of interest to them that we do not already own, and guarantee that there is already a verifiable interest in the e-books we purchase.

Problems with Westlaw Campus and Serials Solutions

If you go to our Serials Solutions A-Z journal tool and find a link for a journal into Westlaw Campus, you’ll find that the link doesn’t work. You get to a Westlaw page that says:

The value of your SP parameter, SPPARM, has not been registered.

If you know your Westlaw password, click here to sign on to westlaw.com

I’ve contacted Mike Waldman about the problem, who is looking into and has in the meanwhile put this message next to links to Westlaw in search results in Serials Solutions:

Link not working at this time. Please connect directly to database via Databases page

So if you’ve found in Serials Solutions that the journal needed is in Westlaw, you’ll want to launch Westlaw directly via the databases page and then use the “publications list” feature in the Westlaw interface to drill down to the journal.

UPDATE: Problem fixed.

Income Tax Assistance from VITA

Reposting here Randy’s message in LIBSDL:

This free income tax clinic is running from Friday, February 4 through Saturday, April 16, 2011. It is located on the ground floor of the Newman Library Building. Its hours of operation are Tuesday through Thursday, noon – 8pm, Friday, noon – 7pm, and Saturday 10am – 4pm.

Students can submit requests for appointment by going to the website at: www.baruch.cuny.edu/vita or emailing BaruchVITA.Service at gmail.com

Assignment to research African-American women inventors

Last night Yvette and I helped a student who said there is an assignment to research African-American women inventors.   She didn’t have any names.

We have books on Madam C. J. Walker, a businesswoman and entrepreneur, whose hair care and beauty products led to great  financial success.  Another resource is a release on important inventions by women from the  US Patent and Trademark office which includes Judy W. Reed and Sarah E. Goode as African-American women who received early patents.  A Google search for African-American women inventors also results in numerous lists  with additional names.

Debt and Equity Financing

An international finance class is researching the foreign equity and debt financing of U.S. companies over the last three years.  The standard source for this information is SDC Platinum.

Another source that some of the student have found helpful is Mergent Online. The company synopsis screen includes a tab for “Long-term Debt” with a comprehensive list of all the company’s bond offerings, whether active or matured. (The list can be sorted so the active issues come to the top of the list.)  To get the details of the bonds, you need to click on the CUSIP number for each bond. The “Added Details” tab will tell you where the bond was listed and if it was offered globally.