We watched a video from Ex Libris about Primo, a web-scale discovery tool that CUNY is working on a licensing for all of the CUNY libraries. We compared the interface with that of Summon (Bearcat Search) and with a trial we have from EBSCO of EBSCO Discovery Service.

Alma

We next looked at the nearly content-free video from Ex Libris about Alma, the company’s uniform resource management system (actual details of the system can be found on the Ex Libris site). Boston College is the first Alma customer to go live (details in this Digital Shift article from Library Journal).

PolicyMap

As a group, we thought it would interesting to poke around in the PolicyMap database we have a trial for (a link to it can be found on the “Trials” tab on the Databases page).

We looked at StackLife, which has been set up for the new Digital Public Library of America and is being piloted for Harvard, too.

• explanation of the interface for the Harvard instance
• video overview of the Harvard instance
• the “about” page for the Harvard instance
• download page on Github

We also looked at how North Carolina State University libraries do a shelf browse. Here’s a sample record:

And here’s the “Browse Shelf” view for that book:

We then looked at BrowZine, an iPad app that lets you browse journals your library has online access to and save them to your bookshelf in the app. This video gives a good overview of what it looks like on an iPad.

 An “Awesome” Recommender

Harvard has also been piloting its “Awesome Box” project. As books are returned to the library, patrons may elect to bypass the usual book drop off slot and instead place the book in an “Awesome Box” as a form of recommendation. Items returned that way show up in a special Awesome at the Harvard Library page (which features a RSS feed of items featured there).

New Baruch-FacStaff Wifi Coming

We learned about a new wifi channel, Baruch-FacStaff, that is being tested out now. When configured on your mobile device–laptop, phone, tablet–it will automatically connect you to the wifi network as soon as you come on campus and it will allow access to the network drives.

Harvard Business Review and EBSCOhost

We talked a bit about the recently announced restrictions on use of Harvard Business Review content in Business Source Complete. It’s not quite clear how or if this will affect our use of the journal.

New Baruch College App Preview

We got a preview of the not-yet-launched update to the Baruch College app (the current version can be found in the iTunes App Store).

• Press release from SPARC
• “Article-Level Metrics: A SPARC Primer” (pdf)

• Print edition
• Ebook (via ebrary)

Article in the New York Times covers “the dark side of open access,” detailing the effort of academics to identify and combat pseudo-science publications and those journals with less-than-rigorous standards for article submissions.

The sources cited are informative and useful for academics for avoiding scam publications and bogus conference offers. Jeffrey Beall’s website maintains a list of individual journals that have made his blacklist and the criteria in which he uses to identify these journals. Also, the special issue of Nature covering “The Future of Publishing” featuring articles “The dark side of publishing” and “Sham journals scam authors” among others.

We talked about the way that Access Services staff have been adding pages regularly to the reference wiki and whether it might be worth renaming the wiki the “Public Services Wiki” to reflect this evolution.

Contracts and Vendor Relations

The increased demand by the state for documentation of interactions with vendors was explored.

Privacy

With the events at Harvard University in mind (the email of deans was searched by administrators trying to find the source of leaks about a cheating scandal), we discussed privacy issues in Baruch’s systems (email, Blackboard, etc.) and the Facebook page, Baruch Secrets (the Ticker covered Baruch Secrets in a story in January).

New Summon Interface

Summon, the service that powers Bearcat Search, will be getting a major overhaul in June. We looked at some of the new features.

We looked under the hood of Kaltura to see how tags and categories are set up and what analytics are available.

Draft of Wall Street Journal LibGuide

To make it easier to see all the print and online options for the Wall Street Journal, a new LibGuide is in the works. We previewed the new guide, which also features instructions with annotated screenshots of how to get to the News Pages feature in Factiva. We also discussed whether it would be worthwhile to do a similar page for the New York Times.

Screen Capture Software

We discussed the strengths and weaknesses of Captivate and Camtasia for video screen captures and SnagIt for image capture.

Guide on the Side

The library website for the University of Arizona features tutorials that appear to the left of selected databases. The libraries at the university developed their own open-source software (available for download) that others can use to design their own tutorials. Examples of some tutorials:

• library catalog
• Academic Search Complete
• LexisNexis Academic

Factiva

We looked at examples in Factiva where the content found in search results actually links you out of the database and onto other parts of the web; some of those sites you are directed to are open, others are paywalled!

Google Sets

If you are creating a spreadsheet in Google Docs and want to create a list of similar items in a column, you can type two sample items in separate cells (such as pigeons and ducks) then easily have Google Sets supply in cells in the column additional items that are similar in nature. While the example on this page just shows days of the week as items you might want to auto-fill in a spreadsheet, it works with lots of other things as well (cities, colors, kinds of dogs, etc.) More details can be found on this post on the Google Operating System blog.

I can’t wait to figure out how I’ll use this in LIB 3040 this semester.

Nolan’s presentation touches on:

• the changing nature of journalism
• new techniques for factchecking
• authority of sources
• what does truth mean
• visual literacy