Reference at Newman Library

while on the reference desk last night, a student asked for help in locating  data on financial aid that Baruch students receive.  I tried the CUNY portal but wasn’t successful.  John Choonoo, of our institutional research office, reminded me of the IPEDS data on the faculty handbook, which seems to cover what the student was seeking.

Students in a business communications course have to find a white paper and critique it.  Ordinarily we wouldn’t have a problem finding government white papers or white papers that cover social or political issues but in this case students are looking for white papers of a different sort, what the Wikipedia calls “commercial white papers“.  They define these as documents used by businesses as a marketing tool to advertise the benefits of a particular product or technology.

Examples can be found by doing some creative searching with Google.  Combine the term “white paper’ with the name of a company. Try it out with Apple or Cisco or Factiva or LexisNexis.  You could also combine “white paper” with terms like marketing, managment,  operations or technology. The Direct Marketing Association, Network World and TechRepublic all have white papers on their websites.

Several bloggers have detailed nicely the ill-advised changes the APA made this year to its citation guidelines for journal articles. The posts by Catherine Pellegrino and Barbara Fister effectively detail why it is a bad idea to require people to have to track down a DOI for an article they want to cite and why it is an even worse idea to ask people to include the journal publisher’s URL even if the version of the article you used was one in a database (JSTOR, Academic Search Complete, etc.)

From what I’ve read online, there are some faculty members at other institutions who are asking their students to follow the more sensible guidelines in the previous edition of the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association (the 5th) instead of the rules in the latest one (the 6th). Should we have conversations with our faculty about the challenges of holding students to the confusing new rules in the 6th edition?

“New Scholarly Books” in the Chronicle Review, a section of the Chronicle of Higher Education,  October 23, 2009, p. B19, notes Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the Anmerican Right by Jennifer Burns (Oxford University Press). In view of the recent destruction of Alan Greenspan’s faith in Rand’s philosophy of unregulated markets, this might be an important book for all interested in the current economy to read.

The SEC  issued three proposals yesterday to make trading through dark pools more transparent. To learn more about the proposals and how dark pools operate, read this SEC Factsheet.

Serials Solutions products have a downtime scheduled from noon to 6pm on Saturday, October 24. This will affect our full-text list of e-journals and Bearcat.

While the topic of “animal studies” might seem unimportant to Baruch readers you might be surprised. The editors of the Chronicle of Higher Education in the section, Chronicle Review, October 23, 2009, put together a special issue on the new multidisciplinary topic “animal studies.”  Crossing every imaginable discipline the editors present articles linking psychology, ethics, history, philosophy, biology, ecology, sociology and literary studies. My favorite part is about how canids, dogs and related creatures such as wolves, signal a wish to play, which is an act of trust. If a member of the pack violates the trust with abusive play the animal ultimately is forced to leave the pack leading to a higher mortality rate. In a moment of wild wonder, I thought, is there any parallel to those–though not playing–who caused economic mayhem? Despite my bias you too might enjoy reading these articles or sharing them as part of your liaison.