Reference at Newman Library

WRDS updated access information

WRDS has updated their platform and how we can access the data.

In particular, they are requiring that each user create an individual account. When users go to register their account they must select their school (Baruch College), select a type of account and enter a Baruch email. They will then receive an email back to confirm that the email address is valid. This email will contain an “Access Pass” link which the user can click on to get direct access into the WRDS system.

Users might not get an account immediately so it might lead to some frustration at the reference desk.

Website Analytics from Compete and Nielsen

If a student is looking for analytical data on the website for a magazine or newspaper, they might find what they are looking for in SRDS, which now has data from Nielsen NetView as well as Compete (data from the latter has been in SRDS for a while). A recent email from the SRDS rep included this description of what metrics are included from Nielsen:

Digital listings for media tracked by Nielsen’s online audience measurement service (also known as NetView) now include the following data:

Unique Audience
Total Sessions
Page Views
Total Minutes
Sessions/Person
Time/Person

Netview data is derived from a panel of 200,000+ consumers, and consists of users at home and non-shared-work locations. All users have a meter downloaded to their computer that tracks online and offline desktop usage.

New York’s new “no fault divorce” law

Yesterday I saw that Governor Patterson had signed on Sunday the law informally referred to as “New York’s no-fault divorce law” but officially the Divorce Reform Act of 2010.  Just in case someone makes an inquiry, the new provisions have not yet been incorporated into the New York Statutes in available online in  Westlaw Campus and Lexis-Nexis.  An important change is that irreconcilable differences are now grounds for granting a divorce.

CUNY+ system status

Message from CUNY’s Office of Library Services:

The Aleph system is once again experiencing performance problems. Recently added records will likely not be available and keyword indexing will be
very slow throughout the day. We are aware of these problems and are
continuing to work with CIS and ExLibris to resolve them. We apologize
for the continued inconvenience that this causes.

World Data Dashboards

Here are a few visually-rich web applications that allow access to world data that students often ask for. The data comes from CIA Factbook, the World Bank and OECD.

World Factbook Dashboard

IBM has built an information dashboard based on of some of the data in the CIA World Factbook. Users can display data on a global scale or by individual country. Variables are limited to Population, Population Growth, Infant Mortality, Agricultural GDP, Industry GDP, Services GDP, Total GDP, GDP by Inhabitants and Inflation.

The display of the data is pretty neat. The dashboard allows users three primary ways to view the data via World Map, Treemap or OLAP (bar charts).  It features a customizable legend and displays a 3D bar and radar charts on the left-hand side to display neighboring country data. There is also a global ranking scale on the left side.

World Map View 

This is the 2nd edition of the World Factbook Dashboard. For more information, check out IBM’s ILOG Blogger.

World Bank Data Dashboard
Compare the World Factbook Dashboard with the World Bank Data Dashboard. It’s not as flashy but the World Bank provides the bulk of their indicators and also allows users to download the data they’re viewing, display information in different languages and enables more traditional browsing for data items.

OECD eXplorer
The OECD eXplorer does a good job of marrying a flashy interface with comprehensive offerings of their data. There is a lot to play around with on OECD eXplorer and thus a bit of a learning curve; but, once you get the hang of it, customizing the data/visuals, selecting and downloading becomes pretty easy.

OECD eXplorer

Note: I first read about these dashboards at the Information Aesthetics blog.

Issues with keyword searching in Aleph

From the university systems librarian:

Aleph is experiencing a couple of problems that are affecting its use.

– keyword search in CUNY+ will likely be VERY slow today and will NOT retrieve newly added records.

– Use direct indexes (author, title, etc)  instead.

Baruch records for ebrary

As you know, ebrary became a CUNY-wide resource earlier this year and records were loaded for all schools (these records’ holdings says CUNY). But because we already subscribed to ebrary, we already had our own records in.

The Central Office will begin removing our records in batches starting next week. We are not losing any records – you will find all the titles under the holdings indicating CUNY.

The only ebrary titles that will keep saying Baruch are those 100 or so titles that we have purchased on our own, separately from the subscription.

Because there are over 40,000 records to be removed, this will take time, so you will find some titles that have a duplicate record in the catalog and some that have not.

I will let you know when this process if finished.