Reference at Newman Library

Year: 2015

Some Lights Off in Library on Friday, June 19

For the benefit of librarians who help our students in chat reference, I’m reposting Arthur Downing’s email here:

CUNY is participating in Daylight Hour, which the University’s Director of Sustainability describes as, “a global campaign to increase awareness about the benefits of using daylighting techniques to brighten workspaces and avoid unnecessary lighting. The campaign was launched last year by Building Energy Exchange and Mayor de Blasio has agreed to participate. Daylighting is a recognized tool used by designers to take advantage of natural light wherever possible and offset power consumption.”

As part of this event, the lights in the north and south window reading areas of the Library will be off for one hour (12:00 – 1:00 p.m.) on Friday, June 19.

Please let staff and library users know so that we do not report a power outage, lighting failures, or burned out light bulbs, etc.

What To Do When a Gale Database Won’t Load

Today I learned about an odd problem that seems to only be affecting Firefox: when you try to connect to some (but not all) Gale databases from our library site, you get an error page from Gale suggesting that there is a problem with our website. I’ve seen this problem especially with MLA International Bibliography and with Academic OneFile. If you use another browser–Chrome, Opera, Internet Explorer–you shouldn’t see this problem. But if you’re in Firefox, you can make it go away by clearing the browser cache.

Mozilla’s instructions for clearing the cache suggest these steps:

  1. Click the menu button New Fx Menu and choose Options.

  2. Select the Advanced panel.
  3. Click on the Network tab.
  4. In the Cached Web Content section, click Clear Now.
    clear cache incontent
  5. Close the about:preferences page. Any changes you’ve made will automatically be saved.

If that fails to load the page, then go back to the databases page, find the link again, and click it to relaunch the database. If it still comes up with the error message from Gale, refresh the page (hit the F5 keyboard button or click the “reload this page” button on the browser toolbar).

OneSearch Issue with Content in Search Results We Don’t Really Have [UPDATED]

[SEE UPDATE BELOW]
If you find an ebook in the search results that it looks like we don’t really have access to, chalk it up to a known issue that first surfaced a few weeks ago. As noted on the “Known Issues” page of the Support @ OLS website:

PCI “ghost” activations: For the past few weeks resources have shown up in Primo searches that are *not* activated in the Primo Central Index. Several schools have reported this problem, and it appears to happen most frequently with ciando eBooks. Other collections that show up are: Credo, Dandy Booksellers, Bridgeman Education, several Oxford University Press collections.

Here’s an example of book you can find in OneSearch from some ebook collection (“ciando eBooks”) that we don’t actually have here at Baruch. If click on the Details tab and scroll down to the bottom of the record, you can see where this ebook record came from:

OneSearch--ebook record from ciando eBooks

If you find one of these, please let Mike or me know so we can report it to CUNY OLS.

UPDATE 8 July 2015: The ghost content that we didn’t really have access to is no longer showing up in search results.

NYC Mass Transit Spatial Layers for GIS

The GIS Lab has just launched a new dataset called the NYC Mass Transit Spatial Layers series. These GIS files contain the stops and routes for NYC buses, subways, and trains (the Long Island Rail Road and Metro-North). The files are released under Creative Commons and are available on the Baruch Geoportal at: http://www.baruch.cuny.edu/geoportal/data/nyc_transit/.

We intend to update the data bi-annually. The layers are provided in a shapefile format that can be used with just about any GIS software, and are projected in the local state plane coordinate system commonly used by City agencies. In the future we plan to add an FAQ to provide new users with tips on how to work with the files.

The series was created so that members of the public would have access to well-documented and readily-usable GIS layers of NYC mass transit features. The MTA publishes a data feed for developers that contains data for stops, trips, and routes, but in a format that’s not readily useable in GIS (for example, routes have to be constructed from long strings of coordinates) or readily useable for making basic map representations of routes or stops (the data is in a General Transit Feed Specification format that’s suitable for constructing schedules and timetables). We have essentially taken this raw data, built a process for transforming and cleaning it, and have documented it using spatial metadata standards.

The process was a team effort that CA’s Rachel Weinberg, Josiah Wahlrab, Araby Smyth and I all contributed to. The CUNY Mapping Service at the Center for Urban Research also deserves recognition – they inspired this project through the detailed documentation they provided on their experiences working with this data feed.

lirr_routes

Database Trial: PolicyMaps

Database description (from the vendor)

PolicyMap is a fully web-based Geographic Information System (GIS) and mapping company. It’s fast, efficient and captures data in visually powerful ways through custom demographic maps, tables, reports and our analysis tool, Analytics. Companies can even use our GIS mapping services to easily incorporate your own data and leverage it against the thousands of indicators already available in PolicyMap. Available data includes demographics, home sale statistics, health data, mortgage trends, school performance scores and labor data like unemployment, crime statistics and city crime rates.

Trial ends

15 July 2015

Access

On campus access only (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)