News and tips by and for staff providing reference services at the Newman Library, Baruch College (New York, NY).
I’ve updated the “Plagiarism Tutorial” page in the Library Services wiki with additional details about the plagiarism tutorial and quiz. The tutorial can be found at:
http://www.baruch.cuny.edu/tutorials/plagiarism/default.htm
The quiz can only be found in Blackboard. For the quiz to be set up, though, a professor has to contact Aisha Peña so she can add it to that professor’s Blackboard course site.
My team in the GIS Lab has just finished writing two new tutorials to help students and faculty find neighborhood census data. The tutorials are in a PDF format and can be used either for hands-on exercises in class or as handouts for self-directed learning.
1. Anastasia has written a tutorial on using the City’s NYC Census Factfinder. She demonstrates how to look up current census profiles for neighborhood tabulation areas and census tracts, and how to combine census tracts to create profiles for user-generated neighborhoods.
2. Janine has written a tutorial for the Social Explorer database. She demonstrates how to navigate the interface, make good looking maps, and how to download data tables for census geographies or user-generated geographies (also built by using census tracts).
These tutorials as well as others previously mentioned (on finding NYC Census data and on using the American Factfinder) are hosted in two places. I’ve created individual boxes for each one on a new Tutorials tab in the NYC Data Guide here: http://guides.newman.baruch.cuny.edu/nyc_data/tutorials. Since each tutorial is in its own box, you can easily embed the ones you want in your own guides. The PDF files themselves are stored on the Baruch Geoportal’s server, and can also be accessed centrally from there.
For those of you who visit courses and do presentations on finding neighborhood data, I’ve just updated my handout “Finding NYC Neighborhood Census Data“. It summarizes the types of geographies, datasets, and resources that are available for finding neighborhood-level census data. The primary change was that I added a new resource called the NYC Factfinder; this is a web-map application produced by the Dept of City Planning that lets users get basic census profiles for census tracts and neighborhood tabulation areas (NTAs). They’ve added a new feature where you can also build your own neighborhood profiles by selecting census tracts. For additional info about the NYC Factfinder you can read this post.
The handout is embedded in key places in the Lib Guides – in the NYC Data (on the Neighborhoods tab) and in the US Census guide. I also updated my American Factfinder tutorial last spring, and it’s also embedded in these guides. Each tutorial has its own box, so if you wanted to embed either one feel free (the boxes are named Finding NYC Neighborhood Census Data and American Factfinder respectively). It’s better to link rather than copy, as I update the tutorials every year or so.
My team is currently working on two new tutorials that are in a similar vein to the American Factfinder tutorial: one for the new NYC Factfinder and another for the Social Explorer. We should have them ready in about a month. I’ll be updating the NYC neighborhood handout again in the spring, once the latest American Community Survey data for 2014 is released at the end of this year. The Census Bureau is dropping the 3-year ACS estimates with the 2014 release, so we’ll just have a choice between 1-year and 5-year estimates. At that point I’ll remove any reference to the 3-year numbers.
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;
