Reference at Newman Library

I don’t know how long it has been available, but a video on the F.I.T. library’s site about librarians helping students with research is extremely well done, especially if you like film noir.

While at the reference desk on Friday,  a student asked for help on grommets–the history, origin, how they changed culture and business. We found patents, articles in American Periodical Series, and some news articles about new uses of grommets.  I found some other resources later so if anyone comes with this question, please let me know.  Grommets are used in sails, tents, shower curtains, hats,  shoes, bras, corsets, crack pipes, art works, cars, planes, tubes to help prevent ear aches,  and many other military and industrial uses.  A search of Westlaw Campus and LexisNexis found some cases in which failed grommets caused personal injuries.  Some patent litigation cases have information on the uses of grommets.  The OED was consulted for the origin of the word.   Sometimes, in fashion, they are referred to as “eyelets.”

The Anne Frank house in Amsterdam has recently added the only known video  of Anne and her family to  YouTube, along with some other videos previously available only in the museum.

The UN is a massive organization composed of smaller agencies, organizations, and projects that all produce data. In many cases the data they provide is hosted on individual websites, which makes it difficult to find and sift through stats.

The UNdata page (http://data.un.org/) is a central repository for statistical data about countries that captures many of these datasets in one place. You can search for datasets or a particular variable or drill down through categories that are arranged by agency and topic. Datasets include population, education, labor, crime, health, technology, trade, and environmental issues. Once you select a particular dataset you can filter by country and build comparative country tables that you can download.

In addition to comparative tables, which show you one variable for many countries, you can also access country profiles which show you many of the variables for one country. Getting to the profiles (which are collectively called the World Statistics Pocketbook) is a little tricky as they are buried on the site – here’s the link – http://data.un.org/CountryProfile.aspx

Today’s workshop, “Database Survival: Better Searching Techniques,” brought out a large crowd of students.  The session was part of the library’s Workshops in 30 series.

Today is the last day to comment on this trial.

I know several of us have helped one or more of the teams who are researching the organic baby foods market.  I thought I would share a few of the more unusual sources that I found.

The USDA just published a report on Marketing U.S. Organic Foods. Charts and graphs from the report can be found here. It doesn’t include data on baby foods but has a good survey of who buys organic foods and how much organics cost.

The Economic Research Service of the USDA has a website devoted to Organic Agriculture. It points to a working paper on the demand for organic baby foods published in 2001 and this lead me to a database called AgEcon at the University of  Minnesota.  A search on organic baby foods there found four reports, the latest from 2009.