Reference at Newman Library

Tag: New Interfaces

American Factfinder – New Interface

As of today, the Census Bureau has revised the American Factfinder Interface (at http://factfinder2.census.gov/) once again, and this time it’s a good improvement. Previously users had everything and the kitchen sink thrown at them – now there is a choice of paths to follow that range from novice to advanced:

  1. The Community Facts lets you type in the name of a state, county, city, or ZIP Code to get basic profiles from several datasets
  2. The Guided Search gives you a basic set of options and a simple path to follow for viewing and downloading comparison tables for the most common census geographies
  3. The Advanced Search is essentially the previous Factfinder2, and gives you access to the entire range of census datasets and variables for all geographies
  4. The FTP site provides power users with a way of downloading tons of data at once

I’ve updated the PDF tutorials / handouts that I mentioned in my post a few days ago to reflect these changes (they’re in the NYC Data and US Census Data LibGuides).

Library Lit and LISTA Merged into New Database

If you go to the databases page or the list of reusable database links in LibGuides, you’ll no longer see a listing for Library Literature or for Library Information Science & Technology Abstracts (LISTA) but instead just one for Library & Information Science Source. When EBSCO acquired H.W. Wilson last year, it was announced that overlapping products would be merged into new, larger databases. Those mergers are now finally rolling out this month.

Any permalinks you’ve bookmarked or put on web pages will still take you to the right record in the old databases; it’s likely that at some point in the future, EBSCO will automatically redirect you from any old permalinks to the same record in the new database.

New Name and Look for Business and Company Resource Center

This month, Gale switched all customers of Business & Company Resource Center over to the new platform, Business Insights: Essentials. If you go to the Databases page now, you’ll see that the listing there for Business & Company Resource Center has a note indicating the name change. There is also now a separate listing for Business Insights: Essentials. We’ll keep this dual listing for the rest of the year to help users who are accustomed to the former name transition to the new one.

If you have added Business & Company Resource Center to a LibGuide, you’ll want to delete the link and use the new link to Business Insights: Essentials that I’ve added to the LibGuides–Reusable Links page. Instructions for how to reuse an existing link in LibGuides are available here.

Also useful:

Need Feedback on Beta Catalog

This month, Baruch is joining City College, LaGuardia Community College, and the Graduate Center, in testing out a new interface to the catalog that we are calling the Beta Catalog for now. Our existing Ex Libris Aleph catalog is not going away; instead, we are trying out a new separate search interface developed by SUNY and used at most of their libraries (IDS Search).

We are only exploring whether we want to offer this catalog search tool and absolutely need as much feedback as we can get about its strengths, weaknesses, quirks, etc.

Here are some key things to know about the Beta Catalog:

  • Searches are not run against our records in Aleph but instead against our records in WorldCat
  • Presents records from local and more distant libraries, with the opportunity to ILL the item
  • Once a record is found, it queries Aleph for availability and location
  • The interface is mobile friendly (unlike our existing catalog)

We plan to do usability tests on the interface to learn more about how our students actually respond to it.

In the meanwhile, we need you to try to use it as much as possible and to let us know how it’s working out for you. Send your feedback in whatever is the easiest way for you:

  • Talk to Mike Waldman or me or email us or call us
  • Print out screenshots and mark up by hand any notable things
  • Come to the Tech Sharecase

By the third week of June, the four libraries piloting this project will see all their feedback passed on to the Beta Catalog developers (at the IDS Project).

In the coming weeks, you can expect to find links to the Beta Catalog on the library home page. Right now, you can find the Beta Catalog in the following places:

Problems with New Project MUSE Interface

In January, Project MUSE rolled out a new interface that now looks like it’s got a few quirks and missing functions.

“Find it” Icon and Link Icon

As noted on my January 6 post about the new interface, Project MUSE doesn’t make it possible for libraries to include an icon for their link resolver, so for us here in CUNY, the connection to SFX is via the link labeled “Find it! @ CUNY.” It’s now apparent that the link to SFX only appears on the search results pages; article records inexplicably fail to offer the SFX link.

What makes the disappearance of the SFX link from article record pages worse is that the pages offer a confusing set of login options at the bottom (none of which are any use to Baruch users) and the pages show on the top right corner a legend for Project MUSE access icons that might on first glance seem to suggest that we do have access (when in fact we really don’t). This screenshot shows the problematic sections of article record pages:

“Saved Citations” Feature Doesn’t Work (Yet)

Although the top right corner of the screen suggests there is a way to have “Saved Citations,” I couldn’t see a way to save anything. I assume this functionality is coming eventually. Here’s a screenshot of the “Saved Citations” feature as it appears right now:

Filter to Search Beyond Baruch’s Subscription Toggles Off

13 Feb. 2012 update: this filter problem now fixed

There is a checkbox on the left side of the search page for “Access” that lets you expand your search beyond “Only content I have access to.” If you run an expanded search and move back and forth between your search results page and article record pages, you’ll see that the checkbox setting you made gets undone and your search results page just shows the more restricted search to “Only content I have access to.”

I’ve reported these issues to Project MUSE and will let you know when they’ve been fixed.

Bearcat Search Re-launched Using Summon

Today, we have launched the newest iteration of Bearcat Search. The technology under the hood for Bearcat Search will no longer be 360 Search (a federated search tool) but instead Summon (a discovery layer tool). With Summon, we now have a much faster and more reliable search tool offering a friendly and easily navigable interface. If you go to the databases page and click on the Bearcat Search log now, it will take you to the new, Summon-powered version.

Here are some tips for searching:

  • Use quotation marks for phrases
  • Boolean operators must be typed in all caps (AND, OR, NOT)
  • Users can skip AND and NOT and instead use the plus sign and minus sign
    • dogs AND cats is the same search as +dogs +cats
    • dogs -puppies is the same search as as dogs NOT puppies
  • Use an asterisk for truncation and a question mark for wildcards

By default, when you search, you should only be finding items that have have full text access to in our of databases. Just as in JSTOR, you can expand the search to go beyond just the items in our collection; look for the checkbox in the the top left corner of the search results page or the advanced search screen labeled “Include results from outside your library’s collection.”

The items indexed in Summon are mostly articles and ebooks. As was the case with 360 Search, Summon won’t help you find numerical data, images, and other non-bibiographic formats of information. Also, we decided not to include records from our catalog in Summon (Summon lets subscribing libraries upload catalog records as well as records from other local collections). Details on coverage for Summon can be found on the Serials Solutions website.

In most instances, any item on the search results page that you click on will take you to an SFX menu that will show you your options for accessing that content; the remainder of time, a click will take you straight to the full text. In the coming year, the percentage of items that require SFX to get you to the full text will decrease and the percentage that feature a direct link will increase (this improvement is part of the vendor’s overall plan to make Summon less reliant on link resolvers like SFX).

Mike Waldman and I are trying to gauge interest in having a training session for this database. If you are interested, please leave a comment here on this post or contact us directly. Also, if you have any questions or problems with the new Bearcat Search, please let us know.

New Project MUSE Interface

This week, Project MUSE launched a major new overhaul of the interface (read the official press release). The most notable element of the new interface is that ebooks from university presses are now part of the site’s indexed content.

As in the case of JSTOR, we have not subscribed to all the collections in this database. Unlike JSTOR, the default search mode to search all of the content (as opposed to the default of only searching what you have licensed). When users search Project MUSE, they’ll see all sorts of content that we might not have in Project MUSE. SFX, though, is set up in Project MUSE, so users should look for a “Find it @ CUNY” link next to such items (sadly, the interface doesn’t allow us to have that text link accompanied by our usual Find It icon. Here’s a screenshot of what the SFX link looks like on  a search results page:



If you want to limit your search to just the content that is immediately available to us in full text within Project MUSE, the only way to do that is AFTER you have run a search in a checkbox that appears on the left side of the search results page. Here’s a screenshot: