Library research help

Uh, no, we won't do your research for you, lol, but if you're stuck and would like some help we'd be glad to do that. Often you can get all the help you need from chatting with one of us, at the reference desk, through an IM and so forth.

Once in awhile though a little more extensive help is needed. Sometimes too we welcome the chance to prep a little before hand with those trickier questions!

Here's an example: someone was researching medicaid spending on people with disabilities. They had gotten some information but were stumped as to where to get more. They clicked on the Research Consultations link on the library home page, logged in, and filled out the short form there. The question got picked up by yours truly, and this week I will be meeting with the person to show them some additional information resources.

Green Housing

Interested in "green" housing? There is a partnership of federal agencies and home builder groups working together in a group called "Partnership for Advancing Technology in Housing (PATH.)

Have a look at their site sometime, there's a lot of great information about current technologies and design projects.

Audiobooks

Interested in audiobooks? Like most college libraries we don't collect very many of these, reserving scare book dollars for print materials, but we do purchase some audio titles occasionally.

You can search them by title in the catalog, like you would anything, or if you'd to browse them the audio collection is on shelves on the one side of the staircase in the center of the main floor.

Looking for used books?

Do you like browsing through used books? We'll be having a book sale here in the library, on the ground floor. It will be April 23-24, look for the signs advertising it as the date draws closer!

A great online site to browse for used books, including textbooks, is AbeBooks, which lists the holdings of over 13,000 booksellers, so there's something for everyone. Are there other sites that you like? Post here and let us know about them.

How many farms in NY? How many in the past?

Heh heh, it's little questions like this that make reference librarians pause... Why? Because finding a seemingly simple statistic can often be rather tricky. Things aren't always counted the way people think they are, or the counting only started recently, or ended years ago...

One good source for this question would be the New York State Statistical Yearbook. (Some recent years of this are online.) We have it here in print, from 1968 to date. The current copy is at the reference desk, and the rest are in our print NY documents collection on the ground floor, NYS Docs 012.1-3 NEWYS 84-8.

Oh, how many? There are 36,000 farms in NY, or were in 2004, the last year reported, and in 1964 (the year cited in the 1968 edition) there were 56,510.

Government documents questions? Ask at our reference desk, or email our government documents librarian, Lori Lampert, directly at llampert@brockport.edu.

Happy Saint Patricks Day!

Here's a take on St. Patricks Day from an Irish newpaper, the Independent of Dublin. Pictured here are children from Gort, in County Galway.

Ethnic NewsWatch

Looking for articles from journals, magazines and newspapers? Want something a little different, maybe not found in other databases like Academic Search? Try Ethnic Newswatch! They describe it pretty well on their site:

Ethnic NewsWatch is an interdisciplinary, bilingual (English and Spanish) and comprehensive full text database of the newspapers, magazines and journals of the ethnic, minority and native press. Designed to provide the "other side of the story," ENW titles offer additional viewpoints from those proffered by the mainstream press.

You can find Ethnic Newswatch in the "E's" on our article databases list page.

Primary material on US-Soviet disarmament?

Among other resources, try our US Government documents collection! A title to consider: Reference Documents on Disarmament Matter, US DOCS PR 34:11/3:D 1-42. It focuses on the late 1950s, and includes letters from then President Eisenhower, memos from Soviet negotiators and more.


Many of our government documents can be found in our catalog, and you are always welcome to ask about them at our reference desk. You are also welcome to contact our government documents librarian, Lori Lampert (llampert@brockport.edu).

Saving your work

No, we don't really have lifeguards in here, saving lost files, lol. Well, actually we do kind of! You can get help from our library reference desk, from the IT HelpDesk which is right here in the library...

But most of all, you can be your own filesaving lifeguard! How? First, whenever you start a file, save it immediately! Don't spend two hours on a powerpoint and never once even do file, save as...

Where to save your files? There are several options, but don't, don't, save them on that public lab PC! Once you leave and the PC logs off, your work will be erased! Save files to the desktop, and email them to yourself. Or, save them to your filecity account. Another option is to use a jump drive. For your own sake do save your work!!

Did men really land on the moon?

Recently Marion Cotillard, a French actress and recent Oscar winner, questioned the Apollo lunar missions, suggesting that perhaps they did not actually occur. While this blogger will leave it to you what to make of that assertion, it does suggest among other things a look at our U.S. government collections.

Drake Library has been a government depository for many years, meaning that we collect and maintain documents from the federal government of all sorts. Lori Lampert, who has assumed the role of our government documents coordinator this year, has been going through our holdings and has run across many interesting items, including:

• Where No Man Has Gone Before: a History of Apollo Lunar Exploration Missions, US DCS, NAS 1:.21:4214.

Interested in this or other US (and NYS) government records that we have? Contact Lori, her email is llampert@brockport.edu, or ask one of us at the reference desk!

From SIC to NAICS in one easy page!

Are you a business or economics student or researcher? Then you'll have an idea of what SIC & NAICS are, they're classification systems for organizing business statistics. Many business books and sites present their statistics organized by these systems. The SIC is the older system, the NAICS the newer one. Some sites and books use both, like our online Business and Company Resource Center. Other resources use one, some the other, so how do you go back and forth, how to compare?

One was is to go to page 307 in our new copy of Business Statistics of the United States. It's a print book in our reference collection, REF HC101 .A13122. There you will find a page that gives an overview of the two systems, and then there are some pages following that show you how the NAICS was derived from the older SIC.

Looking for a movie?

Use our catalog, Books & Media on the library webpage. If it's a particular movie, whether a feature film or a documentary, just search by title like you would a book.

If you want to see if we have movies on a particular subject, say African Dance, click on the Advanced Search button, put in your search words, then change the drop down for Collections to Video.