Reference at Newman Library

FYI- A student who was helped at the reference desk Thursday night said that there is an extra credit paper that everyone in the class may do.  It is on comparing the Dow Theory to the Elliott wave theory.  She plans to use the MTA collection heavily and thought others would too.  These materials need to be paged, per the wiki entry on the MTA collection.

Crain’s New York has an article today about a report that will be released this Friday at a Baruch conference on entrepreneurship in the state.   The Baruch reports finds a need to encourage the creation of a new small businesses.

Resource Shelf covers the addition of legal materials to Google Scholar at http://www.resourceshelf.com/2009/11/17/… .  The advanced search option allows targeted searching by jurisdiction and type of document (federal or state case, patent, article).   As noted by Resource Shelf, many  of these materials are already available on the web (Justia offers federal cases linked to Pacer dockets and there are several free sources for patents, including the U.S. Patent Office) but now  these materials are part of the Google Scholar database.   Google Scholar is also linking to materials (e.g. law review articles)  in propriety databases, including Lexis and HeinOnline.

On this Thursday, the SLA NY chapter is having an Information Forum in the conference center on the 7th floor.  It is one of the events of the SLA’s centennial celebration by the local chapter.  A member emailed me today that he would like to tweet at the conference and would access to the wireless network be available.  I asked Arthur, and he said it would be if the person obtained a guest log in at the reference desk.  So, I replied to the person this information and explained how to obtain a guest log in at the reference desk.   So far, I have had only one request.  The organizers of the event are referring questions to me.  (The person who plans to tweet is a student at Pratt and on the SLA NY Advisory Board.)  I thought I would let everyone know about this person’s inquiry and the response that I received.

After sitting through a 30-minute presentation from Serials Solutions about the new release of 360 Search, I learned that  starting in mid to late December we should have the ability to do a few new things with Bearcat (which is powered by 360 Search) that weren’t possible before or that were harder to do before:

• connect more databases to Bearcat that we couldn’t before
• control (to a limited extent, I think) how individual databases are searched
• customize subject clusters of databases ourselves (instead of having to send request to Serials Solutions asking them to do it for us)

We are experiencing problems with remote access to this database at this time. Saad is investigating. On-campus access is fine.

I have been having trouble with some keyword searches of SEC filings in Thomson Research (when one selects the Edgar Free Text Search).  For the past several searches I have tried, I receive a notice that no results were found.  For example, executive compensation recovery in proxy statements.  When I try the same keywords in Edgar Online I-Metrix,  and in proxy statements, I receive a number of results.  Is any one else having problems with Thomson Research on such keyword searches?

Does anyone have any thoughts about how we might approach roving reference now that the rows of computers on the 2nd floor extend far back into areas that are equally populated by students poring over books at tables and cubicles? Before we had the new computers, you could safely walk by the rows of computers and announce, “Does anyone need help?” to nobody in particular. Now if you do that too far back on the 2nd floor, I wonder if the folks who aren’t on computers but are studying or reading might find it annoying to have someone like me asking aloud if anyone needs help. Maybe we can just rove these areas in the back silently?