Reference at Newman Library

Year: 2014

Trial to Intelecom

Through October 15, there is a CUNY-wide trial to Intelecom. This database offers a collection of streaming videos in the following areas:

  • Adult Basic Education
  • Environmental Studies
  • Health
  • History
  • Oceanography
  • Philosophy
  • Political Science
  • Psychology
  • Sociology

A link to the database can be found in the usual location on the Trials tab on the main databases page. To login, you’ll want to use the user name and password that are visible when you mouse over the link on the Trials tab.

Feel free to share news of this trial with any faculty who might be interested (and give them the user name and password info in your email). Feedback should be sent using the online form on the Trials tab.

Uncovering History

The Baruch College Archives is excited to introduce a new blog, “An Adventure in Democracy,” which will chronicle the processing of our exciting collection of papers and memorabilia from the New York Bureau of Municipal Research, later known as the National Institute of Public Administration and after 1931 as just the Institute of Public Administration. We will be highlighting interesting aspects of both the procedures involved in organizing the collection, as well as historical tidbits which are discovered along the way. Follow “our adventures” and please share this with others. https://blogs.baruch.cuny.edu/ipaprocessing/

Challenging Research Assignments in PSY 4012 (Evolution of Modern Psychology)

In the coming weeks, expect to see some particularly broad and challenging research questions from students in PSY 4012 (Evolution of Modern Psychology). This is the capstone class for the psychology minor and is made up of 12 recitation sections. Each recitation section is broken down into small groups to write portions of a textbook about the history of psychology. Students are expected to go deeper than a mere litany of this researcher said this, then that research said that. Instead, they are expected to explore the connections between ideas in psychology and philosophy and to look at how historical forces affected the directions that psychological research moved in.

The instructor who teaches the two sections, Prof. David O’Brien, kindly shared with me the research topics that each section had to write about. As per his wishes, I’m not posting the topics here but have put them in the password-protected Library Services wiki on the Assignments page.

If you get any students asking for help with questions that sound like they might be for this class, please consider:

Trial to the Criterion Collection

Through November 17, all of CUNY Baruch has trial access to the Criterion Collection, which offers streaming video for feature films from some of the world’s greatest directors (Kurosawa, Bergman, Cassavetes, Fellini, Truffaut, Fassbinder, Renoir, Antonioni, and more). I know what I’m doing this weekend….

Access is via the link the “Trials” tab on the databases page.

Please share this with any faculty who might be interested and encourage them to offer feedback on the form that’s on the Trials tab of the databases page.

 

Tutorials on E-Reserve for SPS Students

Amanda Timolat alerted me to something novel that’s in our e-reserve system this fall: online tutorials about the Python programming language. You may get, as I have, students from SPS asking for help getting to “the Python tutorial.” In actuality, the Python web tutorials are just streaming videos that can only be accessed from within the e-reserve system.

Those students are in one of the two sections of SPS-IS210 Software Application Programming I. They can look up the courses on our course reserve system by instructor name (either Kramer or Heuschober) or by department (look for “School of Professional Studies” on the list of departments). Once they get into the course page in our course reserve system, they can look for the link for “Web Programming with Python.” On the next page, student should click “Click here for more information” to get to a table of contents page for the videos, from which they can actually launch individual videos in the tutorial;

Course reserves--Web programming with Python

Problem with Access to Recent Journal Issues on SpringerLink (UPDATED)

UPDATE 9/26/2014: This problem is now fixed.

 

There is a problem in the CUNY-wide subscription to a bundle of journals from Springer that is preventing us from getting to the full text of recent journal issues on the SpringerLink platform. For example, we should have access from 1997 to the present for Social Indicators Research, but when you click through to the SpringerLink platform to the landing page for that journal, the most recent issue where you can get full text is March 2014 (volume 116, issue 1).

If someone is unable to get to any Springer content that we should have access to (you can verify that using the A-Z journals search), feel free to suggest to them that it is OK to put in an interlibrary loan request for the article. Any ILL request that they send it should mention in the note form that the article is unavailable from Springer.

As soon as this problem is resolved with the vendor, there’ll be an update here on the blog.

Problem with “Articles” Search Is Now Fixed

The issue reported here last week that identified an occasional problem connecting to full text from search results pages in “Articles” search (AKA Summon and Bearcat Search) has been resolved. It turned out to be a problem with settings in SFX, our system overseen by CUNY OLS that powers the “Find it! @ CUNY” service.

As always, please share any instances with Mike Waldman where you get a “Find it! @ CUNY” menu that fails to connect to the right article or other resource. Details to include in your communication with Mike are:

  • what database you were in when you clicked on the “Find it! @ CUNY” button
  • what article you were trying to track down
  • the URL for the “Find it! @ CUNY” menu (every one that gets generated has a unique URL that provides key info for troubleshooting)