Reference at Newman Library

New Custom Search Boxes for Your LibGuides

On the privately published guide, “LibGuides–Reusable Boxes,” you’ll find a growing array of custom search boxes that you can add to your own research guides and course guides. The latest addition I added is a search box that will search a specific collection in CUNY Academic Works. This new box is set up to help students find honors theses in our collections. If you’d like to have a custom search box set up for a different collection in CUNY Academic Works, let me know.

Instructions for how to reuse a box can be found on this page from Springshare.

New in OneSearch: Ejournal Holdings Summaries and CUNY Academic Works Records

Ejournal Holdings Summaries

Until yesterday, if you wanted to find out what years of online coverage we had for a given periodical, you had to use the “Journal Search” feature in OneSearch, then click through from the results page to view a full record, and then eyeball the list of databases where holdings details are available. Now, there’s a shortcut. When you run a search, you’ll see on the results page a summary of online holdings for each periodical that has any:

Holdings info in brief results page
When you first see the search results of a journal search, it may take a few seconds for the online holdings summary to load after the “Available online” text. If you click through to the journal record, you’ll see the same summary statement at the top of the record. You can see this from the links below:

As you can see from the sample journal record for Developmental Psychology, if the journal also has print or microform holdings, those don’t display tidy summary statement at the top of the record or in the brief display in the search results; for that info, you’ll still need to scroll down to the Locations section of the record.

CUNY Academic Works Records

When we moved from Primo to Primo VE in August 2020, we lost the ability to have OneSearch index records in CUNY Academic Works. That feature is now finally back thanks to work by CUNY OLS.

 

Finding Online Theses from Baruch Students

It’s that time of year when theses written by Baruch students start to trickle in to the CUNY Academic Works system. I’ve been processing them as they come in and thought it might be useful to provide a quick summary of what is actually online.

  1. Our online collections include only two kinds of theses: theses written for undergraduate honors and theses for the masters in corporate communication.
  2. Not every thesis is online. Each year, some students elect not to put their work online for various reasons (such those undergraduate honors thesis writers whose thesis is a work of fiction or a collection of short stories).
  3. The online collection of undergraduate honors theses goes back to the 1986, while the online collection of masters theses in corporate communication only go back to 2019. We do have a microfilm collection of older masters theses in corporate communications as well, which can be found via searches in OneSearch.
  4. Both kinds of theses are lumped together in the “Student Theses” collection in CUNY Academic Works. If you want to find just one kind of theses, you can search for them by using these specific search queries:
  • “corporate communication” will find all the digital versions of masters theses in that program we’ve received since 2019
  • “honors” will find all the digital versions of undergraduate honors theses we’ve received since 1986