News and tips by and for staff providing reference services at the Newman Library, Baruch College (New York, NY).
I have an email question from a faculty member about surveys and polls in Lexis Nexis. She wrote that there used to be more surveys and polls there, but they seem to be gone now. I saw that the Gallup polls are there, but she said there used to be more than that.
Frank and Linda suggested the ICPSR and Tablebase databases as other places she could go. Does anyone else have suggestions?
Thanks for Prof. John Goering we have access to Property Shark which has real estate data.
It is available only at 2 of the reference computers, and needs a login, which is in the wiki.
His students have been told to come to the reference desk to use the database.
Last Thursday the Human Resources Council and Center for Nonprofit Strategy and Management at Baruch College presented a forum, called The Helpers Need Help: New York City’s Nonprofit Human Service Organizations Persevering in Uncertain Times. The report has been getting a lot of media attention, including the following, which has a link to the full report:http://www.humanservicescouncil.org/ , which can be downloaded.
Today’s NYT has an interesting story “At Festival, A Splash from Michael Moore but Cautions on Documentaries” (headline of print edition). The story mentions a new report from the Center for Social Media at American University, “Honest Truths: Documentary Filmmakers on Ethical Challenges in Their Work.”
From an information literacy viewpoint, as a librarian I found the article’s references to the report, based on interviews of documentary filmmakers, indicating that manipulation of “individual facts, sequences and meanings of images” if that might help viewers to grasp the documentary’s “higher truth” very interesting. I took a brief look at the full report and plan to read all of it.
The Baruch Geoportal (formerly known as the Baruch Geoserver) is now a public website that can be accessed from anywhere. The Geoportal is hosted in the library and provides GIS data, maps, and information about GIS facilities and educational opportunities at Baruch.
You can access it from this url:
http://www.baruch.cuny.edu/geoportal/
There are also links to the Geoportal from the library’s databases page and from the geography / GIS subject guide.
The following EBSCO databases have been upgraded:
The following database is new:
Brought to you by ERAC.
It has been removed from the list of databases.
A current student assignment is to write about an industry or activity that could foster growth of the U.S. economy. One source you might point out to students is our Recession Resources guide, especially the “News & Updates” pages which cover the government response to the financial crisis. The White House does a nice job of covering the Economy in one of their Issues pages.
You can read more about the Recession Resources guide in an interview with Jean Yaremchuk that appeared in the last issue of The Ticker.
Social Explorer can also be used to find Census data on age, sex, race, education, income, employment status and many other variables. You can export the data to Excel or in report format. If you have used Social Explorer to map an area, you can quickly link to the underlying data. To find out how to do this, follow the simple steps in the video that shows “How to Report from Map.”
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rM-iKj1V6-A&hl=en&fs=1&]
Social Explorer has added short videos showing how to map their Census data.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z318STN8EuU&hl=en&fs=1&]