School of Professional Studies – Reference at Newman Library

SFX and OneSearch Problems at the CUNY SPS Computer Lab

If you are in chat or email reference, you may run across students from the CUNY School of Professional Studies who are reporting problems accessing full text of articles (you can easily spot students in chat and email from CUNY SPS, as their email addresses end with @spsmail.cuny.edu). If you get one of these questions, ask if the student is in the SPS computer lab (which is not on the Baruch campus but over on West 31st Street). If they are, the problem is probably related to an issue with the way the computer network is configured there. At the moment, the lab’s network blocks SFX from working properly (SFX is what’s makes the Find It button in databases work and is the system that also is behind the scenes in OneSearch whenever you click the “Full text online” link in search results).

Please note that this problem is not affecting anyone here on the Baruch campus or who is off campus (except that one SPS computer lab on W. 31st St.)

Workarounds:

If it’s a specific article or ebook that the student is trying to access, help them figure out what database has full text access (use the A-Z journals page for articles or the library catalog for ebooks) and tell them to use that path to do an end run around SFX and OneSearch.
If they’re just searching generally, point them to a specific database or the library catalog.

The CUNY Office of Library Services is working with CUNY SPS to make sure that SFX works properly in that lab and should have this solved soon.

Reference Question about Interpersonal Spacing

We’re getting that question again from SPS students who need to find articles on interpersonal spacing. From what I can tell, the students are required to find research articles on interpersonal spacing that were published in the past ten years. Going to PsycINFO and just searching “interpersonal spacing” doesn’t get you far enough, apparently. Instead, recommend to students that they set up the search this way:

Search box 1: type “personal space” and select “SU Subjects” from the search option

Search box 2: type “interpersonal” but leave search option to default setting of “Select a field (optional)”

Here’s a screenshot of the search boxes:

The trick is not to fall into the trap of assuming that “interpersonal spacing” is the best search. “Personal space” is the subject descriptor that gets used for all the articles that do happen to have “interpersonal spacing.” In the thesaurus, the scope note for “personal space” says the term is defined as “Minimal spatial distance preferred by an individual in his/her relations with others.”

By adding “interpersonal” as an additional search word, the results are a bit more focused on the concept of “interpersonal spacing” than if you just found all the articles that have the “personal space” subject descriptor.

After you run the search, change the sort option from “Relevance” to “Date Newest”

Tutorials on E-Reserve for SPS Students

Amanda Timolat alerted me to something novel that’s in our e-reserve system this fall: online tutorials about the Python programming language. You may get, as I have, students from SPS asking for help getting to “the Python tutorial.” In actuality, the Python web tutorials are just streaming videos that can only be accessed from within the e-reserve system.

Those students are in one of the two sections of SPS-IS210 Software Application Programming I. They can look up the courses on our course reserve system by instructor name (either Kramer or Heuschober) or by department (look for “School of Professional Studies” on the list of departments). Once they get into the course page in our course reserve system, they can look for the link for “Web Programming with Python.” On the next page, student should click “Click here for more information” to get to a table of contents page for the videos, from which they can actually launch individual videos in the tutorial;