Reference at Newman Library

Who says print reference is dead? Not this guy, who can’t wait to get his hands on the new edition of The Enyclopedia of New York City (Baruch’s in on order). In this interview, editor Kenneth Jackson talks about what’s new in the 2nd edition.

The Census Bureau just released a new dataset as part of the American Community Survey. The new 5-year (2005-2009) American Community Survey (ACS) estimates provide data for all areas of the country; all counties and cities regardless of population size, and small areas such as census tracts (but no zip codes – ACS data won’t be provided at the zip code level).

Read the full press release here.

The 5 year estimates are best for small areas, like tracts, that aren’t available in the other series (3 year and 1 year estimates). For neighborhood level stats it’s still best to stick with the 3 year PUMA-level data via the neighborhood map in most cases. Updated estimates for the 3 year series will be available in January.

2010 Census data is still in the works; they should release preliminary stats for apportionment in another week or so.

We’ve had many students asking how long it will be until their Fall 2010 printing allotment expires.

The BCTC helpdesk gave me this date.

I was wondering if anyone thinks there would be good reason for us to have a LibGuide about finding case studies. I am thinking of a guide that would cover all the disciplines in which case studies are common (business, medicine, psychology, etc.)

The guide could have info about how to find case studies in different subjects as well as info about restrictions on the Harvard Business School Press case studies. FWIW, after a student recently asked for help finding Harvard case studies, I directed her to look for other case studies in Business Source Complete. To help her, I made a screenshot to show her how to set up the search screen to limit the document type to “Case Study.”

So what about it? Should we do a LibGuide? What should be in it if we done?

This video offers an interesting way to explain the housing bubble to students. The game-like graphics and the simplified narrative make this an engaging way to introduce the basic outline of the bubble narrative.

Ecoland – Bubble story from Denis van Waerebeke on Vimeo.

–via Information Aesthetics

Ellen Kaufman published a really helpful new LibGuide recently on copyright. It’s got a bunch of great links that are probably just as useful for us as they are for our students.

Thanks to a nice post by Wayne Bivens-Tatum at Academic Librarian, “The Timing of the Research Question,” I ran across a really interesting article by a librarian and a writing professor that identifies the points of disconnect between librarians and freshman composition faculty over when a student should have developed a research question:

Nutefall, Jennifer E. and Phyllis Mentzell Ryder. “The Timing of the Research Question: First-Year Writing Faculty and Instruction Librarians’ Differing Perspectives.” portal: Libraries and the Academy 10.4 (2010): 437-449. Project MUSE. Web. 2 Dec. 2010. [link]

One of the takeaways is that librarians want students to develop a question earlier in the research process than writing instructors typically do. It is suggested that librarians and writing faculty have more explicit discussions about this issue and how it affects the work they need to do with students in their respective arenas (workshops and reference service points for the librarians and classrooms for the the writing faculty).

We now have trial access to IGI Global (available only on campus), which offers entries from handbooks and encyclopedias as well as book chapters on all manner of IT and information science topics. Any feedback you have can be added here as a comment to this post.

On the WRDS platform, we now have access to OptionMetrics, a database that provides data on option prices.

The new version of Microsoft Outlook that we now have on our desktops allow us to subscribe to blogs and have new posts show up within Outlook. There are a couple of ways to add blog subscriptions to Outlook. The first way is to add the URL for the feed–the feed for any blog has a unique web address–into Microsoft Outlook. The second way, which I’ll demonstrate in the video below, lets you add more than one blog subscription at a time; the second way requires that someone has created a special file, called an OPML file, that bundles together the URLs for more than one blog feed.

I’ve created an OPML file that bundles together four feeds: all the posts in the reference blog, all the comments in the reference blog, all the posts in the Idea Lab blog, and all the comments in the Idea Lab blog. The OPML file I made can be downloaded from the “Blogs” page in the reference wiki and then imported into Microsoft Outlook. This video shows you how.