Reference at Newman Library

New Database: Global Issues in Context

All CUNY libraries now have a new subscription to a Gale database: Global Issues in Context. Here’s Gale’s description of it:

Global Issues in Context offers international viewpoints on a broad spectrum of global issues, topics, and current events. Featured are hundreds of continuously updated issue and country portals that bring together a variety of specially selected, highly relevant sources for analysis of social, political, military, economic, environmental, health, and cultural issues. Each of these gateway pages includes an overview, unique “perspectives” articles written by local experts, reference, periodical, primary source and statistical information. Rich multimedia – including podcasts, video, and interactive graphs – enhance each portal. Use Browse Issues and Topics, Country Finder, Basic Search or Advanced Search to explore the database.

You’ll now find a link to it on the databases page and on these subject database pages:

  • Journalism
  • Political Science
  • Public Affairs

Planned Maintenance on January 25 Will Affect OneSearch, Catalog, and SFX

Between 8:30 am and 11:30 am on Monday, January 25, a number of key library systems will be down or have limited functionality as planned maintenance work is done on local servers:

  • the library catalog will be completely down
  • SFX, which powers the “Find it @ CUNY” button in databases, will be completely down
  • OneSearch will still be searchable, but you won’t be able to:
    • get live availability data for books we own
    • place holds or requests for books we own
    • check your library account
    • link to the full text of articles (because this functionality is powered by SFX, which will be down entirely)

 

Helping Faculty with Bibliometrics

Here’s a great source from the libraries at the University of Michigan to point you in the right direction for assisting faculty with questions about:

  • citation analysis for articles and books
  • journal impact factors
  • journal rankings
  • journal acceptance rates

Although we don’t have access to some of the resources the University of Michigan does, the CUNY Graduate Center does (such as Cabell’s and Scopus).

Catalog experiencing display issues

The catalog is experiencing display issues that seem to be centered around a disconnect between call numbers and the rest of the record (so a call number search for example will not display title information). This is happening both on the public catalog and the GUI. CUNY OLS is investigating. If you find any of these records, please report them to me.

Remote Access for CCH IntelliConnect

I’m not sure what’s going on at Wolters Kluwer with their CCH IntelliConnect database but I’ve now had to update EZproxy settings twice in the past month to keep up with changes Wolters Kluwer has been making on their end. Remote access had once again been disrupted over the weekend; thanks to the help of librarians on the EZproxy mailing list, I’ve got our remote access working again.

If you see any problems with remote access with this or any other database, please let me or Mike know ASAP.