Reference at Newman Library

Year: 2015

Visitors to Our Library Are Not Able to Access Ebooks from Books24x7

UPDATE: Since I published this blog post, I realized that in fact only Baruch students and faculty can access ebooks from Books24x7. Both the links in the catalog and OneSearch to titles from Books24x7 and the link to Books24x7 on the A-Z databases page all require getting past our remote access login page (even when you are here on campus). This means that there is no way for visitors to access titles from Books24x7.

Below you’ll see the original blog post I wrote (I’ve since crossed out the text). I’m sorry for the confusion.

If someone from another CUNY college has a made a special trip to Baruch just to access an ebook from Books24x7, please make sure that they use the Books24x7 link on the A-Z databases page to get to that ebook instead of using a link to the ebook found in OneSearch or the library catalog.

If that visitor to our library tries to go to a Books24x7 title from a link found in a record in OneSearch or Books24x7, they will get the remote access login page even here on campus (and this page is, of course, something that visitors here have no way to get past). A few years ago, Books24x7 changed some technical settings on their end that required us to set up catalog and OneSearch access in this nutty way.

This odd access set up–the remote access login from catalog and OneSearch links even here on campus–is unique to Books24x7 titles; you won’t see it happen with ebooks from Ebrary, EBSCO, MyiLibrary, etc.

UK Census and US Election Data in the Social Explorer

The Social Explorer has recently added some new datasets. US Demography is still their primary module, which includes historical and current US Census data from the decennial census and the American Community Survey. But if you were looking for UK Census data, you’re now in luck! The United Kingdom 2011 Census is available for England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. The UK module works the same way as the US one; you can make good-looking web maps using a variety of different geographies, and download census reports.

UK Census Data

Just in time for the upcoming 2016 election, they’ve added a US Election Data module. You can create maps of voter registration and actual election outcomes for presidential, congressional, and gubernatorial elections at the state and county level for the past decade or so. Unfortunately you can’t download any of the underlying data; they’ve partnered with Dave Leip’s and his Atlas of Presidential Elections, and he holds a virtual monopoly on this information. There are public and free alternatives for voter registration and federal election data at the state level, but they are from two different sources: the Census Current Population Survey for the former and the Federal Election Commission for the latter. A central, reliable, public source for county-level data is non-existent. Despite this large shortcoming, the Social Explorer module is still useful for exploring and visualizing election data.

US Election Data

The Social Explorer is available via our databases page, and you can access each of the modules under the Maps heading. Scroll down and pick the one you’d like.

Expanded Video Content from Kanopy

Since January 2014, we’ve had a small collection of videos listed on the databases page as “Media Education Foundation.” As of last week, we now have access to the entire video collection on that vendor’s platform. You’ll now find a link to Kanopy on the databases page (we’ll keep the separate link for Media Education Foundation for now, as some faculty use it regularly).

Here’s an overview of what we now get from Kanopy:

Over 1,000 documentaries and feature films in the fields of business, communications studies, social sciences, language studies, visual and performing arts, film studies, and history. Includes titles from PBS, BBC, Criterion Collection, and other independent and foreign film producers.

Updated Search Functionality in OneSearch

In the past week, the CUNY Office of Library services have announced two new expansions of search functionality in OneSearch:

  1. Searchers can can tweak the relevance ranking of their results with the “Personalize your results” option on the left side of search results. When you select this option, you are given a window to select what broad subject areas your interests are in. More details on the CUNY OLS blog post, “Personalize Your OneSearch Results!”

  2. More MARC fields in CUNY catalog records are indexed and searchable in OneSearch. As detailed in the CUNY OLS blog post, “New Ways to Search OneSearch,” the specific fields relate to local notes added by our catalogers to records. This should make local content a bit more findable.

Updates to the NYC Neighborhood Handout

For those of you who visit courses and do presentations on finding neighborhood data, I’ve just updated my handout “Finding NYC Neighborhood Census Data“. It summarizes the types of geographies, datasets, and resources that are available for finding neighborhood-level census data. The primary change was that I added a new resource called the NYC Factfinder; this is a web-map application produced by the Dept of City Planning that lets users get basic census profiles for census tracts and neighborhood tabulation areas (NTAs). They’ve added a new feature where you can also build your own neighborhood profiles by selecting census tracts. For additional info about the NYC Factfinder you can read this post.

The handout is embedded in key places in the Lib Guides – in the NYC Data (on the Neighborhoods tab) and in the US Census guide. I also updated my American Factfinder tutorial last spring, and it’s also embedded in these guides. Each tutorial has its own box, so if you wanted to embed either one feel free (the boxes are named Finding NYC Neighborhood Census Data and American Factfinder respectively). It’s better to link rather than copy, as I update the tutorials every year or so.

My team is currently working on two new tutorials that are in a similar vein to the American Factfinder tutorial: one for the new NYC Factfinder and another for the Social Explorer. We should have them ready in about a month. I’ll be updating the NYC neighborhood handout again in the spring, once the latest American Community Survey data for 2014 is released at the end of this year. The Census Bureau is dropping the 3-year ACS estimates with the 2014 release, so we’ll just have a choice between 1-year and 5-year estimates. At that point I’ll remove any reference to the 3-year numbers.

Updates to the ReferenceUSA Historical Data

Over the summer we purchased two files that include all of the businesses and many of their attributes that were in the ReferenceUSA database for 2013 and 2014. Our historical data collection now covers 1997 to 2014. The data is stored in large delimited text files, and current Baruch students, faculty and staff can request extracts from these files here:

https://www.baruch.cuny.edu/confluence/display/geoportal/ReferenceUSA+Historical

There’s also a link to this page from our list of databases, under ReferenceUSA Historical Data.

This resource is for users who want to study historical change in individual business establishments in a given area over time. In most cases users who make these requests need to have experience with working with large datasets. All of the requests I’ve filled to date are from graduate students or faculty.

Patrons who are looking for current data or who have basic requests should use the ReferenceUSA database instead. Patrons who are looking for historical or contemporary summaries of business establishments (i.e. sums or counts of businesses by type and geography instead of lists of individual businesses) can use the Census Bureau’s County or ZIP Code Business Patterns data instead.