Reference at Newman Library

GIS Practicum Fall 2013

This semester’s GIS (geographic information systems) Practicum, Introduction to GIS Using Open Source Software, will take place on the following Fridays:

  • October 4th
  • November 8th

    • The day-long workshop runs from 9am to 4:30pm. CUNY graduate students, faculty, and staff are eligible to register; Baruch undergrads may register with permission from the instructor. Advance registration is required; the fee is $30 and includes a detailed tutorial manual and a light breakfast. Visit the GIS Practicum page to learn more and to register: http://guides.newman.baruch.cuny.edu/gis/gisprac

    A second, advanced workshop, Introduction to Spatial Databases Using Open Source Software, will be offered for the first time this semester. The half-day workshop runs from 9am to 12:30pm on the following Fridays:

    • October 11th
    • November 1st
    • December 6th

    Eligibility requirements are the same, except that participants must also have prior GIS experience. Advance registration is required; the fee is $10 and includes a tutorial booklet and hot beverages. Visit the Spatial Database Practicum page to learn more and to register: http://guides.newman.baruch.cuny.edu/gis/spatialdb

    Registration for both sessions begins on August 30th. Feel free to circulate this info to students and faculty, but please do not post via listservs. I have fliers in my office if anyone would like some to distribute.

How to Get Daily Email Digest of Changes to the Wiki

If you’d like to get an email at the end of the day with a list of all the pages that have had edits to them (and a link you can use to go straight to each page), here’s how to set that up in the wiki.

Step 1: Click “Browse” to get a drop-down menu

Wiki--how to watch a wiki--1

 

Step 2. Select “Advanced” from the drop-down menu

Wiki--how to watch a wiki--2

Step 3: Under “Subscribe” on the lower left, select “Start watching this space” (a “space” is a specific wiki within the Confluence system we use)

Wiki--how to watch a wiki--3

 

Step 4: There is no step 4. You’re done!

Good to know:

 

Access Services Announcements in the Reference Wiki

You may have noticed in the past year, staff from Access Services have been adding pages to the Reference Wiki with the same aims we had when we launched the wiki years ago: to create a place where we could document policies, procedures, and best practices for our service.

As we gear up for the new semester, it may be useful to take a look at the _Announcements page that the Access Services staff are updating. It contains all sorts of nuggets of info that might help us at the reference desk.

News Pages in Factiva Show Headlines When There Is No Full Text Access

Louise alerted Mike and me that several sources whose daily headlines are displayed on the News Pages section of Factiva wouldn’t let us click through to the full text. The two newspapers with this issue are the Chicago Tribune and the Los Angeles Times. If you try to click through on a headline, you get this error message:

Factiva--news pages error message

 

After contacting the vendor (ProQuest in this case, as they handle academic markets for this Dow Jones product) and from responses I got on the ERIL-L mailing list, I learned that there is nothing that we can do. Others have reported this problem over the years and only heard the the vendor say they’ll add it to the list of feature requests.

As you can see from the image below, there is a drop-down menu on the top left corner that lets you select other sets of sources. One of them is a set of sources called “United States: Academic” that also puts the WSJ and the NYT at the top of the page, but then instead of showing the LA Times and the Chicago Tribune, it offers another newspaper for which we have no access here: the San Francisco Chronicle.

In other databases, we do have limited access to these three papers that are unhelpfully displayed in the New Pages:

Factiva--news pages problem

 

Judge rules “stop and frisk” is unconstitutional in NYC

Judge Scheidlin’s decision in the New York City “stop and frisk” case can be found at http://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/750413/floyd-v-city-of-ny-liability.pdf.  The judge found the policy to be unconstitutional. The decision was announced this morning.   (It is 198 pages long.)

I found the decision published on WNYC shortly after it was announced.