News and tips by and for staff providing reference services at the Newman Library, Baruch College (New York, NY).
From 6 am – 9 am on Tuesday, January 12, all the databases and resources that use EZproxy for authentication will be unavailable while we upgrade the EZproxy software. This affects any resource where the URL begins:
https://remote.baruch.cuny.edu
Searches may still be run in OneSearch as well as in other databases that don’t use EZproxy for authentication (e.g., O’Reilly, WRDS, etc.)
As soon as the work is complete (including testing), an updated blog post will be published here.
ProQuest has just launched a freely available database called Black Freedom Struggle in the United States. This new resource, which is now listed on our databases pages, brings together primary sources from 1790s to the present from a variety of ProQuest databases, some of which we already have access to and others that are new to us.
Description
More than 70,000 streaming video titles spanning a range of subject areas including anthropology, business, counseling, film, health, history, music, and more.
Trial Ends
November 28, 2020
Access
On and off campus. Use the link on the Trials tab on the databases page.
Feedback
Please share with any faculty who might be interested and recommend they use the trial feedback form (also linked to on the Trials tab on the databases page).
In a new page in the Library Services Wiki titled “Sharing Database Links with Students and Faculty,” I tried to create guidelines that cover all the ways one might share something from a database with a student or faculty member. I also included workarounds for the databases where you have to take extra steps to be able to share something. Please take a look and let me know if something isn’t clear or doesn’t work as expected.
Related post: Identifying Articles from Weird EBSCO Database URLs
In the past week, we’ve added a dozen or more additional resources to our growing list of databases that we have trial access to or that the vendor has temporarily expanded our existing access. The “Trials” tab on the A-Z databases page has temporarily been renamed “Trials & COVID-19” to indicate the mix of resources found there. On that page, you’ll see one box for all the trials and expanded access we now have courtesy of vendors who wanted to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic. There is a separate box on that page for the few databases that we were already considering as subscription possibilities.
Please look over the list of newly added resources and let me know by email or a comment on this post which subject database pages some of those resources should be added to.
We’ve taken advantage of many offers this past week for free database trials or expanded content access in our already subscribed databases. A complete and still growing list of these can be found on the Trials tab of the A-Z databases page. If the trial or expanded access is long enough (at least 3 months), then we’re also adding some of those trial links to subject database pages as well. Feel free to add any of these trial database to your research guides, too.
If LibGuides happens to be down, there is backup spreadsheet linked to at the top of the “Databases Overview” page in the Library Services wiki (password protected) that has all of our databases and their URLs. I just updated the spreadsheet today with the current information.
CUNY has cancelled this subscription due to low use.
On the off chance that the LibGuides system goes down, we’d be without access to our A-Z database list. I’ve created a backup of the list in HTML and PDF formats. If you go to the Databases Overview page in our Library Services Wiki (access to this wiki is restricted to library staff), you’ll find links to those backup files at the top of the page.
On the chance that someone is mistakenly trying to connect to a database like Factiva by searching for it in OneSearch, we decided to create a way to help that searcher out by giving them an easy-to-find link in the search results. Here’s what it looks like if you search for Factiva:
The green “Full text available” link uses the same proxied URL that is found on our A-Z database pages. If the searcher instead clicks the record title for “Factiva,” they’ll get the OneSearch record for Factiva with more info about the database and the same green “Full text available” link.
This new feature improves on the way we handled such searches in the past. The earlier “resource recommender” system in OneSearch put a link in a special box above the search results if you happened to search for “factiva.” Now you’ll find a record in the first or second position of search results, a more obvious and visible place. In usability tests, I noticed that students typically didn’t notice these “resource recommender” notifications; my guess is that students tuned them out because they’ve learned from search engines that what sits above the search results are ads that usually can be ignored.
CUNY OLS has set up this integration between LibGuides and OneSearch so that the OneSearch system looks at our A-Z database list (specifically, our “database assets in LibGuides”) once a week to harvest the latest set of records about our databases. This regular updating allows the OneSearch system to automatically capture things like:
If you’re curious, you can find all the database records from LibGuides in the OneSearch system by searching for BB_LIBGUIDES_DB.