New in the Library – Page 10 – Reference at Newman Library

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).

New Database: LGBT Life with Full Text

Thanks to a CUNY Central acquisition, all CUNY libraries now have access to LGBT Life with Full Text, which is on the EBSCOhost platform. Our links to this database can be found on the main databases page as well as the following subject listings of databases:

History
Psychology
Sociology
Women’s Studies

If there are other subject listings of databases that you think this one should be added to, please post it here in the comments or email Mike with that request.

The database is notable not just for the subject area it covers but also for its mix of periodicals and ebooks and its thesaurus.

Twayne Authors no longer available

NOVEL has stopped its subscription to Twayne Authors and we no longer have access to it.

Two New Primary Source Collections from Gale

All CUNY libraries now have access to two new digital collections of primary sources from Gale:

Slavery & Anti-Slavery
Nineteenth Century Collections Online

They have been added to our A-Z databases page and the history databases page.

New Ebook Collection from the APA

We now have access to the ebook editions of all the handbooks published by the American Psychological Association. As soon as we can get the MARC records for each title loaded into the catalog, you’ll be able to find them when doing searches in the catalog. Until then, you can go to the APA Books listing on the databases page and run searches there for them (once you click that APA Books link, you’re taken to the APA PsycNET interface, where you can find the handbooks and all the other ebooks we get from the APA).

New Catalog Feature Lets You Text the Call Number to Yourself

The staff at the CUNY OLS just added a new feature to the catalog today that lets you send the basic holdings info (title, location, and call number) as a text message to your phone.

When you are looking at the holdings screen for an item, you’ll now see a new button, “Send Info via Text.”

If you click the button, you are asked to enter your phone number (no spaces or punctuation marks) and select your carrier (Verizon, AT&T, etc.).

Once you do that, click the “Send Message” button at the bottom of the screen and in about a minute, you’ll get a text from the sender “[email protected].” The body of the text includes the title of the work, the location, and the call number. The end of the message reads, “DO NOT RESPOND,” as any replies a patron may try to send back will go nowhere.

If you find any odd behavior or text messages from this new system, please let me or Mike Waldman know so we can forward the info on to CUNY OLS.

Better Paths to New York Times and the Wall Street Journal

We’ve now launched a more streamlined way to let our users know about the options they have for online and print access to the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, something that replaces the multiple links we used to offer on the Databases page and that now also provides instructions for how to read either paper in Factiva via the News Pages feature.

Instead of three listing on the Databases page for the New York Times pointing to three different links, we have one that points to a new LibGuide page. By removing the multiple listings on the Databases page, we’ve made things a little easier on the eye (and the attendant cognitive load) for the user. Similarily, we’ve gone from two listings for the Wall Steet Journal to one that goes to a dedicated LibGuide for that paper.

Each of these new LibGuide pages features:

a box with links to the main online access options
a box with info about where to find the print edition
a box with screenshot instructions of how to get to the News Pages feature in Factiva and how to use it to select a section of the paper or a different issue of the paper

This project was begun after looking at the search logs in Summon (AKA Bearcat Search) and in the site search feature of the library website, both of which featured a very high number of queries for those newspapers by name. We already knew anecdotally from reference interactions that students commonly asked for help getting to those newspapers. By looking at the search logs of Summon and the site search we could see that a number of students were mistakenly going there to get to the newspapers instead of using the A-Z journal lookup feature from Serials Solutions that the “Journals” search feature connects to.

With the publication of these new guides, students will be more likely to get a usable hit in the site search feature on the site (because it indexes not just library web pages but also all of our LibGuides). If students search in Summon for “new york times” or “wall st journal,” they’ll now see a “Best Bet” search result for that points to the appropriate LibGuide page. Try these sample Summon searches to see how that works:

New Database: Latin American Weekly Report

We now have access to the Latin American Weekly Report. It provides in-depth analysis of political, strategic, and economic developments throughout the region. Once in the database, go to “Access Publications” and select the Latin American Weekly Report. This can be useful to anyone who wants to keep abreast of developments in Latin America, and they do cover all of Latin America, not just the larger countries as if often the case.

Counseling Therapy and Video Is Now Alexander Street Counseling

Counseling Therapy and Video has now been renamed as Alexander Street Counseling. For the rest of the spring semester, there will be links to it under both names on the Databases page; at the end of the semester, we’ll just keep the link for Alexander Street Counseling. There is a note in the database description for both versions that mentions the name change.

Tag: New in the Library