Reference at Newman Library

Year: 2014

New Page in the Library Services Wiki: Laptop Kiosk

I’ve started a page in the Library Services Wiki about the new laptop kiosk. There’s not a lot of info there. If you know a thing or two about the kiosk, please help out by adding to the entry in the wiki. When you’re working evenings at the reference desk or on weekends, it’s especially useful to have info like this at your fingertips in the wiki.

Database Trial: J.P. Morgan Research

Description (from vendor): “Features thousands of analyst reports covering over 3,000 global companies and all industries. Derived from Morgan Markets – which is J.P. Morgan’s exclusive information for key clients and investors…. Coverage is 2011 to current with a one week embargo. Lengthy reports cover equities and company performance, global and regional economics and financial strategy, foreign exchange, commodities, liquidity, and emerging markets.”

Access: “Trials” tab on the databases page (off-campus access available)

Trial ends: June 14

Feedback: Add as a comment to this blog post or complete the “Feedback for Library Resource Trials” form

Baruch’s elibrary e-books can be searched using keywords

Last week, I was helping a student who was looking for books about relations between Turkey and Israel. I found an e-book on the topic, and opened it via the link on the CUNY catalog.

By accident, I typed the search terms “Turkey Israel relations” in the Search field at the top left of the screen, rather than the Search Document field toward the top center of the page, under the blue “eLibrary Reader” button.

For purposes of illustration, I’m using a screenshot from a totally unrelated ebook, “Learning Python with Raspberry Pi” to illustrate the search:

Learning Python with Raspberry Pi Screenshot♦
The search results were quite helpful – see below for the results:

ebrary- Simple Search Results – Turkey Israel relations

 

 

 

New Statistics Databases Page

There is a new subject-specific databases page for statistics. One of the challenges in designing this page was to recognize that when a student asks for “statistics” they usually have some specific topic in mind. This page attempts to steer them to some of the more common areas where our students ask for statistics but does not try to overwhelm them with every last possible topic area where they might be seeking statistics.

Over the summer, I’ll do some usability testing with this page to see if how well it aligns with user expectations. I’ll also be looking at the page statistics in LibGuides to see what links people are actually clicking on (Springshare offers instructions on how to do this for your own guides).

If you have any feedback you’d like to offer, please append it here as a comment to this blog post.

Fix to Harvard Business Review in SFX Menus

This spring, we discovered that the Find It service was not working for articles rom the Harvard Business Review (HBR). This is what it looked like:

  1. User finds an article record in a database where HBR was not available in full text but is indexed; user then clicks the “Find It” icon
  2. A SFX menu opens showing a link to the article in Business Source Complete; user clicks that link
  3. When Business Source Complete opens, the user sees an article record for the requested article but there are no links to the full text (even though it is actually in the database if you then search for it directly)

It turns out that EBSCO was just hiding the full text thanks to the troublesome deal that EBSCO and Harvard Business School Press have that forbids direct linking to HBR articles unless your library pays an additional subscription fee (see these recent blog posts for details). On the SFX mailing list, a workaround was suggested that I asked CUNY OLS to implement (CUNY OLS manages the SFX service for all CUNY libraries).

Now, when you get a SFX menu, you’ll get a working direct link to the full text of article. The link is labeled “Harvard Business Review (EBSCOhost).” You can see what this looks like on this SFX menu.