Reference at Newman Library

Tag: Course Reserves

Tutorials on E-Reserve for SPS Students

Amanda Timolat alerted me to something novel that’s in our e-reserve system this fall: online tutorials about the Python programming language. You may get, as I have, students from SPS asking for help getting to “the Python tutorial.” In actuality, the Python web tutorials are just streaming videos that can only be accessed from within the e-reserve system.

Those students are in one of the two sections of SPS-IS210 Software Application Programming I. They can look up the courses on our course reserve system by instructor name (either Kramer or Heuschober) or by department (look for “School of Professional Studies” on the list of departments). Once they get into the course page in our course reserve system, they can look for the link for “Web Programming with Python.” On the next page, student should click “Click here for more information” to get to a table of contents page for the videos, from which they can actually launch individual videos in the tutorial;

Course reserves--Web programming with Python

Remote Access to Course Reserves Is Not Working

Over the weekend, remote access to the course reserve system stopped working (on campus access seems to be fine). When you try to connect to course reserves right now, you get the usual Baruch login page, and then, once you’re past that, get an error page from Docutek that looks like this:

Docutek--Remote access error message

We’re contacting vendors (Docutek for the course reserves system and OCLC for the EZproxy software that manages remote access to library resources) to find a way to fix this.

UPDATE (10/28/2013, 3:30 pm): The system is now available again from off campus.

Restrictions on Harvard Business Review Articles for Course Reserve

In case you hadn’t seen the notices that have been going up in various places lately (such as this one from the Baruch weekly e-news that just came in via email), faculty are being notified that due to licensing restrictions from Harvard Business School Press there are restrictions on use of articles from Harvard Business Review, which is exclusively available from ESBCO in Business Source Complete.

Here is the announcement from the weekly e-news:

Restrictions on Use of the Harvard Business Review
Baruch College faculty are advised that special restrictions regarding the use of the Harvard Business Review for course reserves have been put in place. The license agreement for the College’s digital version of the Harvard Business Review in EBSCOhost does not permit article-level linking from the database to course reserves, as the agreement does for all other publications in the database. This is a restriction imposed by the Harvard Business Review. As a result, the library cannot place articles from this journal on e-reserve. Faculty who assign articles from the Harvard Business Review in their courses may direct students to search for the article directly in the EBSCOhost database Business Source Complete. If you have any questions please contact the library’s access services department.

PAF 9318 problems with e-reserve readings

Two students complained that two readings on e-reserve are too small to read.  The articles were reduced to 75% and the students also said they are older and don’t have young eyes.  I am going to ask Access services to redo the readings.  The first, by Jonathan Kozol, from the Dec. 2005 issue of Phi Delta Kappan, Confections of Apartheid, is available through JSTOR and some of our other databases.  The second, a chapter in Deborah Stone’s book, Policy Paradox: The art of political decision making, may be available in the 1997 edition of the book, of which we have two copies.  The 2002 edition is currently in transit.

 

Rita