Reference at Newman Library

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 “libraries@cuny.edu.” 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.

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:

• http://baruch.summon.serialssolutions.com/search?s.q=wall+street+journal
• http://baruch.summon.serialssolutions.com/search?s.q=new+york+times

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 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.

Based on what we learned during usability testing of the new site and on feedback we’ve received since the site launched on December 26, there have been some more links added to the site to help students and faculty find links to the main databases page.

• On the Students drop-down menu (and on the side navigation of pages in the Students section)
• On the Faculty drop-down menu (and on the side navigation of pages in the Faculty section)

Also, the wording for one of the links to databases on the yellow search bar has changed.

formerly:

Databases All or By Subject

now:

Databases By Name or By Subject

The placeholder language in the search bar has also changed for the Articles search and Journals search functions to make it more clear what is being searched.

With the new website, we have implemented a new way to share our trials. They can be found in a separate tab in the alphabetical Databases listing. We have a couple of current trials going on.

Historical Periodicals:

African American Historical Serials Collection

Gateway to North America: People, Places, and Organizations of 19th-Century New York

Revolutionary War Era Orderly Books from the New-York Historical Society

These are from EBSCO. These are potential purchases, not subscriptions.

Psychology:

PsycCRITIQUES and PsycEXTRA offer book reviews, technical reports, government documents and other such material relating to Psychology. Also on the EBSCO platform. This is a subscription.

It would be very helpful if you could let me know here or via email if you think these can be used to support the curriculum and how they would fit within our current holdings.

As we continue this year the process of iterative design (usability test–>tweak–>usability test–>tweak, etc.), it’s hoped that the site will keep pace with our users’ expectations of where things should be and how those things should behave. With that caveat out of the way, here are some notable links on the new website that can offer shortcuts for those of us used to certain paths to key resources and services.

Catalog link

• On the “Help” page, go to the “Books” portion of the “How Do I Find…”

Click to embiggen

My Account (patron account info the catalog)

• Go to the “Renew a Book” page in the “Students category.

Click to embiggen

Search All CUNY Libraries from the Search Bar

• Select “Books” in the search bar, then select “Advanced Search,” then choose “All CUNY Libraries” from the drop down menu

Click to embiggen

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.

Statista is a portal for business, government and demographic statistics and reports.  What sets this database apart from others is that it features data as infographics, samples of which can be seen at their free “Chart of the Day.” All graphs/tables can be downloaded, saved or e-mailed.

Statista gathers statistical information from over 10,000 different sources in 23 major industry sectors. Their sources include reports from market researchers, trade and scientific organizations, and government sources.  Some sources come free from the web like World Bank data and reports from the EIA and FCC and other federal agencies. Others are subscription-based sources like Gartner, IDC, and ComScore. Reports from accounting firms Deloitte and PwC are included as are analyst reports from Credit Suisse, Jeffries, Deutsche Bank and others.

Geographic coverage is worldwide with excellent resources covering the U.S. and Europe (Statista is based in Germany) and expanding content for Asia and Latin America especially Brazil, India, and China.

Statista also aggregates data from multiple sources in company and industry Dossiers.  These are lengthy reports (some are 70 or more pages) in PPT and are free for download. They cover both U.S. and international companies and markets. Have a look at the company dossier on Apple  or the industry dossier on Beer Production and Distribution for example.

All graphs/tables come with “Reading Support” that explains the numbers, cites the source, and links directly to the source where available. Data can be downloaded to Excel, in JPG format or as a Powerpoint.

The big Goggle-like search box works well. Search results can be filtered by region or type of data (for example, rankings, forecasts or time series). Results can be sorted by date or by relevance. Browsing by category or keyword is available by clicking on the “Markets” tab. Opening up a “Category” will give direct access to data and reports on that industry category as well as a search box for searching within that category.

I’d especially recommend this database for students doing industry research because of its wide coverage of specialized industry research sources.

Thanks to funding from CUNY Central, we recently gained access to a couple of databases from Gale that contain unique historical collections:

• National Geographic Magazine Archive offers the every single page (even the ads) from the magazine published between 1888 and 1994. It’s a blast to browse.
  • product fact sheet (pdf)
• 17th-18th Century Burney Collection Newspapers, the new champ for the database with the longest name, is best known for providing the largest collection of British newspapers. It also includes pamphlets, broadsides, etc.
  • product fact sheet (pdf)