Reference at Newman Library

Author: Stephen Francoeur

Database Trial: Digital Theatre Plus

Through March 19, CUNY has a trial for Digital Theatre Plus. Access is available from on and off campus (look for the link on the Trials tab of the Databases page).

This database offers streaming video recordings of plays performed on stages around the world. The site also offers commentary and analysis of many of the featured works.

Please share news of this trial with faculty you work with and encourage them to provide feedback using the Qualtrics form linked to on the Trials tab of the Databases page.

OneSearch Now Has Records for Items in Naxos Music Library

Recent updates from Ex Libris now make it possible for searchers to find recordings from the Naxos Music Library in OneSearch. As you can see in this screenshot of a search for “Aguas da Amazonia,” the second item in the results list is a record for the audio file in Naxos:

Search results

If you click the title, you’ll get a more complete record. If you click the “Full text available” link in the search results or in the full record, it will take you to the page in Naxos for that album.

At the moment, the label for the link for “Full text available” doesn’t make a lot of sense (something like “Listen now” or “Stream now” would be more appropriate). Instead, all links to indexed content have to use the same link text. Ex Libris hasn’t yet come up with a way that the text can be customized depending on the item content in the record; they are aware of this problem and are planning to fix this in a future release of Primo.

Records for Databases Now in OneSearch

On the chance that someone is mistakenly trying to connect to a database like Factiva by searching for it in OneSearch, we decided to create a way to help that searcher out by giving them an easy-to-find link in the search results. Here’s what it looks like if you search for Factiva:

Factiva record in search results

The green “Full text available” link uses the same proxied URL that is found on our A-Z database pages. If the searcher instead clicks the record title for “Factiva,” they’ll get the OneSearch record for Factiva with more info about the database and the same green “Full text available” link.

This new feature improves on the way we handled such searches in the past. The earlier “resource recommender” system in OneSearch put a link in a special box above the search results if you happened to search for “factiva.” Now you’ll find a record in the first or second position of search results, a more obvious and visible place. In usability tests, I noticed that students typically didn’t notice these “resource recommender” notifications; my guess is that students tuned them out because they’ve learned from search engines that what sits above the search results are ads that usually can be ignored.

CUNY OLS has set up this integration between LibGuides and OneSearch so that the OneSearch system looks at our A-Z database list (specifically, our “database assets in LibGuides”) once a week to harvest the latest set of records about our databases. This regular updating allows the OneSearch system to automatically capture things like:

  • name changes we’ve made on our A-Z list
  • new databases we’ve added or old ones we’ve cancelled
  • new URLs for existing databases

If you’re curious, you can find all the database records from LibGuides in the OneSearch system by searching for BB_LIBGUIDES_DB.

New Option in OneSearch to Search Across CUNY Catalog Records

We’ve made it a bit easier to replicate a “union catalog” search in OneSearch. When you are in the OneSearch interface and begin typing a query, a set of options appears below that let you change the scope of your search, including a new option for “All CUNY.”

Search scopes as you type

If you don’t select one of these scopes but just run the search (by clicking the magnifying glass button in the search box or hitting the “Enter” key), the search will be run in the “Baruch” search scope.

To understand the difference between the three search scopes, this  chart compares what can be found in each one:

Search scopes in OneSearch

Please note that the “All CUNY” search scope does not let you find e-resources that are uniquely held by other CUNY libraries but it does let you find what books (particularly print ones) that they may uniquely own.

Scheduled Downtime for E-Journal Portal on February 8-9

Between 8 pm on Friday, February 8, and 8 pm on Saturday, February 9, the system from Serials Solutions that lets us look up online journal access will be down for scheduled maintenance by the vendor.

Links on the library website that point to https://zm3uh2fr3l.search.serialssolutions.com/ejp/?libHash=ZM3UH2FR3L#/?language=en-US&titleType=JOURNALS will not work.

Searches run in the yellow search box using the options for “Journals” or “Newspapers + Magazines” will also not work (see the screenshot below of the search box).

Search options in yellow search box

As a workaround for determining what database has a given periodical, you can use the “Citation Linker” tool from SFX (the system behind the blue “Find it @ CUNY” buttons you see in databases) to look up a journal by name or ISSN.