News and tips by and for staff providing reference services at the Newman Library, Baruch College (New York, NY).
We already have a support ticket in with the BCTC Help Desk to look into the problem with print jobs from across campus mysteriously coming out of our ref desk printer. I just added an additional item to that ticket to note that we can no longer sent print jobs from the ref desk computers to the printer.
If you want to check on the status of the ticket, it is #19616.
We now have access to some of the content in Oxford Handbooks Online, a database that offers authoritative reviews of the literature on different topics (kind of like the Annual Reviews database we also subscribe to). We have access to articles from 2012 in the following areas:Â psychology, business, management, finance, economics, and political science.
The default search returns results across the whole collection, not just the smaller portion that we actually subscribe to. After you run a search, there is a checkbox you can click to filter your results to the ones we actually have access to:
The IRS Office of Statistics on Income publishes a dataset that lists the names and addresses of all tax-exempt organizations in the country that are required to file with the IRS: the Exempt Organizations Business Master File Extract.
Since we get many questions about non-profits in the city, and since this resource is raw data that isn’t readily useable for all purposes (selecting just the records in NYC is actually quite a chore), I’ve created a subset that contains just the records for the five boroughs. The data is available in a spreadsheet file that contains: one metadata sheet, one sheet that lists all of the organizations, and one that summarizes them by borough and exempt organization subcode. The large majority of records in the file are classified as 501(3)c organizations, which include most public charities and private foundations.
I’ve modified the records by adding a ZIP-5 code, a county/borough code, and by cleaning up and standardizing the city name in the address field; otherwise the records are exact duplicates of what appears in the original IRS file. The records represent all tax-exempt organizations that filed a 990 Form with the IRS – it doesn’t represent all non-profits. Religious organizations, state and federal public institutions, and small charities with annual revenue less than $50,000 are not required to file (but some do anyway). Since the IRS extracted this information directly from forms submitted by filers, records may contain spelling or classification errors and could appear in duplicate. Users will need to bear this in mind, and may have to clean the data further based on their intended purpose.
The file is available via the NYC Data LibGuide, on the Health and Human Services tab in a dedicated box I’ve created called IRS Tax-Exempt Organizations in NYC. If you have a LibGuide for a course or another subject feel free to *link* to this box in your guide if you find it relevant. I’ve created a process that enables me to easily update the data, which I plan on doing on a quarterly basis (the IRS updates its master file monthly). If you link to the box the contents will be automatically updated as I release new versions (whereas if you create a copy, the file will become stale as the copy is severed from the original box).
For more information and full documentation about the dataset you can visit the IRS Exempt Organization Master File page (I also provide a link to it from the LibGuide box).
Students who were selected in the lottery for the TI-89 graphing calculators can pick them up now from the circulation desk. Students have until 10 pm on Tuesday, September 10, to pick them up. Beginning Wednesday, September 11, all remaining calculators will be distributed from the 3rd floor laptop desk on a first-come, first-served basis.
this schedule is now confirmed and posted to the Reference Desk LibGuide.
this schedule is now confirmed and posted to the Reference Desk LibGuide.
Today, I’ve been substantially updating the entry on Ebooks in the reference wiki to give public services staff a quick overview of the various platforms we have.
As I was working on this, I made a mental note to return later to Sage Research Methods Online, which I can see is going to be the place I go to from now on to get any answers about methodologies I should use for my own research. Not only are there hundreds of books here, there are also 26 videos that give me another way to take in the information.
We’ve volunteered to be beta testers for a new FirstSearch interface for WorldCat. Mike and I had been discussing swapping out the link on our databases page for WorldCat that points to the old, clunky FirstSearch interface with the cleaner free version at WorldCat.org, which some of our users may have actually encountered and which offers lots of nice features for our patrons.
Today, a link to the beta interface for WorldCat has been added to the Trials tab of the databases page. Feedback about the new interface and how it compares to the WorldCat.org version will help us decide whether we should go ahead with linking to the new FirstSearch version or the WorldCat.org one. Please use the database trials form or comments to this blog post to share your thoughts. Feel free to pass along this request for comments to students and faculty you work with.
If you want to learn more about the new FirstSearch interface, OCLC has archived a webinar about it on YouTube. The best parts are:
this schedule is now confirmed and posted to the Reference Desk LibGuide.
This month, Gale launched a new interface to Literature Criticism Online. It’s a much cleaner look for the database and worth checking out, as gives us a sneak peak at the new Artemis interface that will soon be available for all of our Gale databases (this was the subject of last week’s Gale demo here at Baruch).
By way of reminder, Literature Criticism Online is a notable resource for us because: