Reference at Newman Library

Year: 2012

Vendor printing only available from stand-up computers

According to Bruce Little of BCTC and the Reference Wiki, vendor printing is only available from the stand-up computers. I’m not certain when this change actually happened, but it was some time during the past six months or so. I know I am personally confused by this since I have assisted guests & currently, non-registered Baruch students with vendor printing at the sit-down computers located behind the Reference Desk within the past six months. Bruce Little is looking into this as per our conversation, today (Jan. 10 , 2012). He states it may be a network problem/glitch. However, the “official” printing policy is that vendor printing can only be done via the stand-up computers.

Question: Are there enough stand-up computers to allow for this limitation? (If this topic has already been covered, my apologies.)

FRED Adds IMF Data

This December the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis added a collection of IMF data to its database of U.S. and international economic time series, FRED.  The data includes 399 financial statistics and monetary aggregates including interest rates, exchange rates, and measures of M1, M2, and M3.

Students will like this resource because of its easy to use interface. The data opens in a graph with options to download or view the underlying data or to save the graph as a pdf.

This data from the IMF is not free elsewhere but can be found in Datastream and in the paper copies of the IMF’s International Financial Statistics Yearbook (at REF HG 61 .I57)

Bearcat Search Re-launched Using Summon

Today, we have launched the newest iteration of Bearcat Search. The technology under the hood for Bearcat Search will no longer be 360 Search (a federated search tool) but instead Summon (a discovery layer tool). With Summon, we now have a much faster and more reliable search tool offering a friendly and easily navigable interface. If you go to the databases page and click on the Bearcat Search log now, it will take you to the new, Summon-powered version.

Here are some tips for searching:

  • Use quotation marks for phrases
  • Boolean operators must be typed in all caps (AND, OR, NOT)
  • Users can skip AND and NOT and instead use the plus sign and minus sign
    • dogs AND cats is the same search as +dogs +cats
    • dogs -puppies is the same search as as dogs NOT puppies
  • Use an asterisk for truncation and a question mark for wildcards

By default, when you search, you should only be finding items that have have full text access to in our of databases. Just as in JSTOR, you can expand the search to go beyond just the items in our collection; look for the checkbox in the the top left corner of the search results page or the advanced search screen labeled “Include results from outside your library’s collection.”

The items indexed in Summon are mostly articles and ebooks. As was the case with 360 Search, Summon won’t help you find numerical data, images, and other non-bibiographic formats of information. Also, we decided not to include records from our catalog in Summon (Summon lets subscribing libraries upload catalog records as well as records from other local collections). Details on coverage for Summon can be found on the Serials Solutions website.

In most instances, any item on the search results page that you click on will take you to an SFX menu that will show you your options for accessing that content; the remainder of time, a click will take you straight to the full text. In the coming year, the percentage of items that require SFX to get you to the full text will decrease and the percentage that feature a direct link will increase (this improvement is part of the vendor’s overall plan to make Summon less reliant on link resolvers like SFX).

Mike Waldman and I are trying to gauge interest in having a training session for this database. If you are interested, please leave a comment here on this post or contact us directly. Also, if you have any questions or problems with the new Bearcat Search, please let us know.

Wilson Databases All Moved to EBSCOhost

As of this week, all of the Wilson databases we had access to on the WilsonWeb platform have moved over to EBSCOhost. Links to these databases have been updated on the library’s databases page and on the LibGuides Reusable Links page. With this move, there are some notable benefits to searchers.

Greater integration with full text

Many article records in WilsonWeb relied on SFX to get you to the full text; now, the records are right within EBSCOhost, which offers a vast trove of full text content. So we’ll see fewer SFX links in Wilson databases than we used to and more direct links to text.

Additional retrospective databases

After the merger, EBSCO gave us access to a bunch of retrospective databases we didn’t have before. Rather than add each one to our databases page as a separate listing, we’ve created a listing in the database that takes you to a page that lets you search the retrospective and the full text editions at the same time. These are the new retrospective indexes we now have:

  • Applied Science & Technology Index Retrospective: 1913-1983
  • Biography Index Retrospective: 1946-1983
  • Education Index Retrospective: 1929-1983
  • Humanities Index Retrospective: 1907-1984
  • Library Literature & Information Science Retrospective: 1905-1983
  • Social Sciences Index Retrospective: 1929-1983

Ability to search a huge set of databases at once

EBSCO has long offered a nice way to search all their databases at once. With all the new Wilson databases that are part of the platform now, that list of databases that could be searched simultaneously is quite large.

Now that all the Wilson databases are available on the EBSCOhost platform, the next step from EBSCO will be merge some of the similar Wilson and EBSCO databases into one project. This post from InfoDocket last summer shows what database mergers may take place.

New Project MUSE Interface

This week, Project MUSE launched a major new overhaul of the interface (read the official press release). The most notable element of the new interface is that ebooks from university presses are now part of the site’s indexed content.

As in the case of JSTOR, we have not subscribed to all the collections in this database. Unlike JSTOR, the default search mode to search all of the content (as opposed to the default of only searching what you have licensed). When users search Project MUSE, they’ll see all sorts of content that we might not have in Project MUSE. SFX, though, is set up in Project MUSE, so users should look for a “Find it @ CUNY” link next to such items (sadly, the interface doesn’t allow us to have that text link accompanied by our usual Find It icon. Here’s a screenshot of what the SFX link looks like on  a search results page:



If you want to limit your search to just the content that is immediately available to us in full text within Project MUSE, the only way to do that is AFTER you have run a search in a checkbox that appears on the left side of the search results page. Here’s a screenshot: