Reference at Newman Library

Year: 2016

Oxford Journals Problem

This week, Oxford University Press switched over their journals platform at oxfordjournals.org  from http to https. The various systems that libraries use to manage e-journal collections–such as the Serials Solutions A-Z journals system and the SFX system that powers our Find It button and the “View Online” button in OneSearch, are trying to play catch up with this change.

If you find that you are unable to load a journal from Oxford on the Oxford Journals platform, one trick that might work is to copy the URL for the page that wouldn’t load into a Word or Notepad document, edit the URL by adding an “s” to the “http” part, deleting any thing that comes after the “.org” part, and then pasting that reworked URL into the address bar.

For example, say you’ve looked up the Journal of American History in our Journals search tool and then you tried to click the “Oxford Journals” link on the results page:

Oxford Journals--SerSol lookup for Journal of American History

That link will take you to a page on the oxfordjournals.org site that won’t fully load.

But, if you copy the URL out of the address bar and paste into a text editor (Notepad, Word, etc.), you’ll see it like this:

http://jah.oxfordjournals.org/archive

Add an “s” after “http” like this and delete the “/archive” bit:

https://jah.oxfordjournals.org

If you paste that URL in the address bar, the page should load properly. Oxford is aware of this mess they’ve created and are working to fix it. Luckily for us, we only have 11 journals on the Oxford Journals platform:

Oxford Journals--11 journals we have

Many of those journals we have in full text in different aggregator databases as well, which offers another access option depending on the volume and issue needed.

As soon as this problem gets sorted out, I’ll post an update here on the blog.

 

Two New Database Trials with Archival Materials

Through March 31, we have trial access to two new collections from Gale:

Access is available from on and off campus. Links to these two databases can be found on the “Trials” tab of the databases page.

Please share this with any faculty who might help us evaluate them and encourage them to use the form on the trials page for providing feedback.

 

Plagiarism Tutorial and Quiz

I’ve updated the “Plagiarism Tutorial” page in the Library Services wiki with additional details about the plagiarism tutorial and quiz. The tutorial can be found at:

http://www.baruch.cuny.edu/tutorials/plagiarism/default.htm

The quiz can only be found in Blackboard. For the quiz to be set up, though, a professor has to contact Aisha Peña so she can add it to that professor’s Blackboard course site.

New Platform for ebrary Coming Soon

This is just a heads up that later this year, ProQuest will migrate ebrary over to its new Ebook Central platform. Once the migration takes places, we’ll do the usual things on the database page when a resource gets renamed:

  • Keep the original database listing for a limited time with a note mentioning the new name (“ebrary is now called Ebook Central”)
  • Eventually rename the original listing and move it as needed to a different tab on the Databases page (a pointer at the old resource name may remain for a while that will link to the tab where the newly renamed link can be found)

It looks like all existing ebrary URLs we have in the catalog (and that we may have added to research guides or e-reserves) will automatically redirect to the new platform once that platform is live.

More details here from ProQuest.

GIS Workshop Registration for Spring 2016 Is Now Open

Registration is now open for the spring semester’s GIS (geographic information systems) Practicum, Introduction to GIS Using Open Source Software (featuring QGIS). The March workshop will be held at the Department of Earth, Environmental, and Geospatial Sciences at Lehman College in the Bronx (20 seats, PCs provided). The April session will be held at Baruch in the GIS Lab (10 seats, participants must bring laptops).

  • Friday Mar 4th
  • Friday Apr 1st

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.

This semester we’re also bringing back the Spatial Databases workshop (featuring Spatialite). The half-day workshop will run from 9am to 12:30pm on Friday April 8th at Lehman College. Eligibility requirements are the same, except that participants must also have prior GIS experience as this is a more advanced workshop. The registration fee is $5. Visit the Spatial Database Practicum page to learn more and to register: http://guides.newman.baruch.cuny.edu/gis/spatialdb.

New Database: Global Issues in Context

All CUNY libraries now have a new subscription to a Gale database: Global Issues in Context. Here’s Gale’s description of it:

Global Issues in Context offers international viewpoints on a broad spectrum of global issues, topics, and current events. Featured are hundreds of continuously updated issue and country portals that bring together a variety of specially selected, highly relevant sources for analysis of social, political, military, economic, environmental, health, and cultural issues. Each of these gateway pages includes an overview, unique “perspectives” articles written by local experts, reference, periodical, primary source and statistical information. Rich multimedia – including podcasts, video, and interactive graphs – enhance each portal. Use Browse Issues and Topics, Country Finder, Basic Search or Advanced Search to explore the database.

You’ll now find a link to it on the databases page and on these subject database pages:

  • Journalism
  • Political Science
  • Public Affairs