Unfortunately, our access to Edgar Online I-Metrix has been suspended until the licensing issues are finalized. I am working closely with our procurement and CUNY Legal to resolve this as quickly as possible.
Tag: Databases
Database Trials: PsycTESTS and PsycEXTRA
Until October 16, we have access to a couple of CUNY-wide trials of databases on the EBSCOhost platform:
PsycTESTS: Access to psychological tests, measures, scales, surveys, and other assessments as well as descriptive information about the test and its development and administration.
PsycEXTRA: Technical, annual and government reports, conference papers, newsletters, magazines, newspapers, consumer brochures and more.
Links to these and other databases we have on trial can be found on the Trials tab of the main databases page. Feedback can be added as a comment to this blog post, emailed to Mike Waldman, or sent using this online form.
New Database: Oxford Handbooks Online
We now have access to some of the content in Oxford Handbooks Online, a database that offers authoritative reviews of the literature on different topics (kind of like the Annual Reviews database we also subscribe to). We have access to articles from 2012 in the following areas: psychology, business, management, finance, economics, and political science.
The default search returns results across the whole collection, not just the smaller portion that we actually subscribe to. After you run a search, there is a checkbox you can click to filter your results to the ones we actually have access to:
Ebooks Overview in the Reference Wiki
Today, I’ve been substantially updating the entry on Ebooks in the reference wiki to give public services staff a quick overview of the various platforms we have.
As I was working on this, I made a mental note to return later to Sage Research Methods Online, which I can see is going to be the place I go to from now on to get any answers about methodologies I should use for my own research. Not only are there hundreds of books here, there are also 26 videos that give me another way to take in the information.
Testing a New Interface for WorldCat
We’ve volunteered to be beta testers for a new FirstSearch interface for WorldCat. Mike and I had been discussing swapping out the link on our databases page for WorldCat that points to the old, clunky FirstSearch interface with the cleaner free version at WorldCat.org, which some of our users may have actually encountered and which offers lots of nice features for our patrons.
Today, a link to the beta interface for WorldCat has been added to the Trials tab of the databases page. Feedback about the new interface and how it compares to the WorldCat.org version will help us decide whether we should go ahead with linking to the new FirstSearch version or the WorldCat.org one. Please use the database trials form or comments to this blog post to share your thoughts. Feel free to pass along this request for comments to students and faculty you work with.
If you want to learn more about the new FirstSearch interface, OCLC has archived a webinar about it on YouTube. The best parts are:
- this introductory part that begins at 5:50 and runs for about 4-5 minutes
- this section that runs for about 2-3 minutes and sums up features and benefits of the new interface
New Interface for Literature Criticism Online
This month, Gale launched a new interface to Literature Criticism Online. It’s a much cleaner look for the database and worth checking out, as gives us a sneak peak at the new Artemis interface that will soon be available for all of our Gale databases (this was the subject of last week’s Gale demo here at Baruch).
By way of reminder, Literature Criticism Online is a notable resource for us because:
- it contains the full text of the following classic reference sets:
- Classical and Medieval Literature Criticism
- Contemporary Literary Criticism
- Drama Criticism
- Literature Criticism from 1400 to 1800
- Nineteenth-Century Literature Criticism
- Poetry Criticism
- Shakespearean Criticism
- Short Story Criticism
- Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism
- entries on specific literary works give you a lengthy overview of the critical discourse on that work
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:
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:
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).
Archival Research Catalog Is Renamed
The National Archives is retiring the Archival Research Catalog and launching a similar but expanded search system under a new name. You can now find it on the Databases page listed as “National Archives: Online Public Access.”
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.