Reference at Newman Library

Year: 2015

MyiLibrary Ebooks Inaccessible from Off Campus If You Use OneSearch

If you are off campus and try to use OneSearch to get to an ebook from MyiLibrary, you will run into a problem. Instead of getting our EZproxy login page (as you would for all off-campus access to e-resources) you get a MyiLibrary login page, which is of course impassable.

This problem only occurs if you are using OneSearch from off campus. You won’t see this problem if you:

  • use the library catalog (the “Books” search on the home page) to search for the book from off or on campus
  • are on campus while using OneSearch

Here’s a video I made to document this problem as part of the support ticket I just sent to the CUNY OLS Help Desk.

I’ll post an update here when the problem is resolved. In the meanwhile, if anyone needs to get to a specific title in MyiLibrary, they should use the Books search on the home page or launch MyiLibrary from the A-Z list of databases.

Database Trial: Psychotherapy.net

Database description

Videos with leading theorists and practitioners in psychotherapy. The trial access we have is to an exclusive set of videos that aren’t available  on the Alexander Street Press platform for Counseling and Therapy in Video (a service we already subscribe to).

Trial ends

30 September 2015

Access

On and off campus access.

Feedback

Please share with any faculty who might be interested and recommend they use the trial feedback form (also linked to on the Trials tab on the databases page)

Database Trial: Bloomberg BNA Tax and Accounting Center

Database description (from the vendor)

The Tax and Accounting Center offers practitioners a comprehensive array of analysis, news, primary sources, and practice tools covering federal, international, and state tax issues and financial accounting.

The Tax and Accounting Center is organized by subject or “Practice Area,” accessible via the tabs located at the top of any of the “home” pages. Clicking the “All” tab at the far left will enable you to access all the content that is included in your subscription. Depending on your research needs, you may prefer to limit your view to the subscribed content accessible via the tabs labeled Federal Tax, State Tax, International Tax, Accounting, or Tax Practice Series. Or, you can click the “Practice Areas” tab on the far right to access content in any of the following Practice Areas: Compensation Planning; Estate Planning; Real Estate; Sales and Use Taxes; Tax-Exempt Organizations; and Transfer Pricing.

Trial ends

30 September 2015

Access

User name and password required (visible on database description field below the link). On and off campus via the link on the Trials tab of the databases page.

Feedback

Please share with any faculty who might be interested and recommend they use the trial feedback form (also linked to on the Trials tab on the databases page)

GIS Workshop Registration for Fall 2015 Is Now Open

Registration is now open for the fall semester’s GIS (geographic information systems) Practicum, Introduction to GIS Using Open Source Software (featuring QGIS). The locations of the sessions will differ from previous years. The October sessions will be held at Baruch in the GIS Lab; they’ll be smaller (10 seats) and participants will need to bring a laptop. The November session will be held at the Department of Earth, Environmental, and Geospatial Sciences at Lehman College in the Bronx. This will be a larger session (20 seats) and PCs will be provided.

  • Oct 2nd
  • Oct 23rd
  • Nov 13th

The day-long workshop runs from 9am to 4:30pm. Current CUNY graduate students, faculty, and staff, and full-time Baruch and Lehman undergrads are eligible to register. Advance registration is required; the fee is $30 and includes a detailed tutorial manual and a light breakfast. Visit the GIS Practicum page to learn more and to register: http://guides.newman.baruch.cuny.edu/gis/gisprac.

Feel free to circulate this info to students and faculty, but please do not post via listservs. I have fliers in my office if anyone would like some to distribute.

I had people sign up throughout the summer for early notification, so they would receive an email as soon as registration opened. A lot of people signed up. If there is excess demand (more people than seats), I may try to squeeze an additional session in somewhere.

New Interface for the Statistical Abstract

Proquest has recently revised the interface to the Statistical Abstract of the United States, making it easier to use. The abstract is a good source for federal statistics that cover a wide range of subjects at the national, regional, and state levels. It’s also useful for determining which agency or department in the government is responsible for publishing a given statistic. Citations with links back to the original sources make it possible to uncover additional data (in particular, for smaller geographic areas like counties and places).

The interface gives you the ability to browse by subject and to drill down to individual topics, which mimic the chapters and tables that appear in the print edition. Alternatively you can search by keywords or phrases across the current or previous Proquest editions of the abstract. Even though the abstract is from 2015 and the first Proquest edition is from 2013, many of the tables contain historic data that stretch back several decades. After doing an initial browse or a search you have the ability to filter the results by date, source, and subject term. Tables can be downloaded in a presentation-friendly PDF format or a data-friendly Excel format.

stat_abstract_interface

The Statistical Abstract was an annual publication that was previously published by the Census Bureau. After over 130 years of continuous publication, the Census Bureau terminated the program for the sake of short-sighted budget cuts. The 2012 Abstract was the last public edition. Proquest acquired the rights to publish the abstract and it has been a proprietary, subscription-based product since 2013. Our subscription includes both the electronic (available via our Databases page) and print (Reference HA 202.A4) editions from Proquest. The Census Bureau still provides access to the older editions they published on their website at http://www.census.gov/prod/www/statistical_abstract.html.

New Interface for S&P NetAdvantage

We just switched over this morning to the new S&P NetAdvantage interface. There’s a new URL for the database, too (I updated the URL in the databases list, which should push out to any mapped links you’ve added to your research guides).

One very confusing thing about the new interface is that by default it doesn’t say “NetAdvantage” on it. To get around that, we used the admin options in the database to add a navigation button to the interface that says “NetAdvantage.” Clicking that button just takes you back to the home page for the database interface.

S&P NetAdvantage--new interface--custom nav button

If you have any tips about navigating the new interface or about content and functionality that we didn’t have in the old interface, please add them as comments to this blog post.