Reference at Newman Library

New Look and Name for Facts on File

By the end of the summer, Facts on File will launch the World News Digest database on a new platform. You can preview by that new interface from a link provided at the top of the current interface:

World News Digest

 

Over the course of several changes to the interface, Facts on File has been making the “World News Digest” part of the name more prominent and the “Facts on File” part less so, as can be seen in this screenshot of the new platform:

World News Digest--new summer 2013 platform

 

With this in mind, we’ll be changing the listing for this database from “Facts on File” to “World News Digest” late next week.

Saving Articles from LexisNexis to Dropbox

LexisNexis Academic now lets searchers save documents to their Dropbox accounts. The user doesn’t have to be on a computer where the Dropbox software has been installed; it will in fact work from any computer that the user is on. When you find an article or group of articles that you want to save to your Drobox account, you click the new “Send to Dropbox” icon that looks like a little cloud:

A window from LexisNexis pops up where you select the format you’d like to save in (Word, HTML, PDF, etc.) Then when you click the Send button in that window, a new window opens from Dropbox asking you to sign in to Dropbox in the browser and allow LexisNexis to create a folder in your Dropbox account where the files will be stored. Once you sign in and allow LexisNexis to connect to Dropbox, the files will be saved to your account.

More details can be found on this help page from LexisNexis.

Baruch staff and faculty who use Dropbox should be aware of CUNY policy against using Dropbox (and other cloud storage services) to store confidential university information there  (details on what counts as “confidential” can be found in the security memo on the CUNY website page about information security).

Problem with the A-Z Journals Search Tool

Lots of Serials Solutions customers are reporting a problem right now that we’re also seeing: if you search for a journal, you won’t be able to click through to all of the search results pages. Here’s a screenshot of an example of the problem:

SerSol index problem

 

You can see this search problem live for yourself with this search results page for “technology,” where I’ve gone to the end of the available search results but logic would suggest there should be more (such as journals that begin with the letter T).

Knowing Serials Solutions, I’d guess that this problem will probably get fixed later today.

MEDLINE (PubMed) Listing on Databases Page to Be Dropped

For many years, we’ve maintained a list on our databases page for the free version of MEDLINE (on the PubMed platform) and the version we get from EBSCOhost. Later this month, we will drop the listing for “MEDLINE (PubMed)” and go with just the “MEDLINE (EBSCOhost)” listing, as the latter one is the only one offering full text and SFX functionality.

Old Databases Page Listing for Business and Company Resource Center to Be Dropped

In September 2012, Gale relaunched Business and Company Resource Center with a totally redesigned interface and a new name, Business Insights: Essentials (as noted in this post on the reference blog). Since that launch, we’ve been offering a link to Business Insights: Essentials on the databases page under two separate listings (one for the current name and one for the old name).

After the Summer semester is over, we will finally remove the listing under the old name and keep just the listing using the current name.

New Database: LGBT Life with Full Text

Thanks to a CUNY Central acquisition, all CUNY libraries now have access to LGBT Life with Full Text, which is on the EBSCOhost platform. Our links to this database can be found on the main databases page as well as the following subject listings of databases:

  • History
  • Psychology
  • Sociology
  • Women’s Studies

If there are other subject listings of databases that you think this one should be added to, please post it here in the comments or email Mike with that request.

The database is notable not just for the subject area it covers but also for its mix of periodicals and ebooks and its thesaurus.