News and tips by and for staff providing reference services at the Newman Library, Baruch College (New York, NY).
We’ve had a couple incomplete logouts this semester which have led to other users not being able to login. To properly logout, select “Exit and Shutdown Comms Server” per the screenshot below. Please inform patrons using Datastream Advance at the reference desk. I’ll send an email to faculty as well w/r/t this information. Let me know if you have any questions.
This December the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis added a collection of IMF data to its database of U.S. and international economic time series, FRED. The data includes 399 financial statistics and monetary aggregates including interest rates, exchange rates, and measures of M1, M2, and M3.
Students will like this resource because of its easy to use interface. The data opens in a graph with options to download or view the underlying data or to save the graph as a pdf.
This data from the IMF is not free elsewhere but can be found in Datastream and in the paper copies of the IMF’s International Financial Statistics Yearbook (at REF HG 61 .I57)
Our version of Datastream is now upgraded thanks to the help of Tam Vo and Thomson Reuters tech support. Functions abound!
Last night a student came to the reference desk looking for data giving the prices of several commodities (gold, any oil) and the CPI for five years for a class assignment due Monday.
She wanted them in downloaded Excel files. I was able to locate what she needed except for Gold. Although I initially missed “Gold” in the currencies available in Factiva (one can download two years from Factiva), Ryan reminded me it was there. (He was walking by and I asked him.)
I also found, after the student left, that the World Gold Council offers historic gold prices from 2000 (daily, monthly, but not annually) downloadable into Excel. Bloomberg, Reuters and Datastream were also mentioned as sources to the student.
Datastream was not available today, and displayed an error message “Service Closed LogonID Suspended” when users attempted to run requests. This was apparently the result of someone attempting to change the account password. I worked with Thomson Reuters support this evening and we reset the account. The application is now working properly on the pc’s at the Reference Desk. I will email tech support at the vertical campus with the fix for installations on faculty pc’s.