LibraryBuzz

September 14, 2023

Students: access free tutoring through tutor.com

City Tech students have free access to tutoring through tutor.com!

How does it work? Tutor.com can be accessed from any internet-ready device 24/7. Students can have access to a tutor when and where they need one. Students receive 3 hours of tutoring each semester and have get more upon request.

To get started: Create a free account by logging into Blackboard, Moving to Organizations at the right side of the screen, click on Here if you need tutoring, and finally move to the left side of the screen to find TUTOR.com and click on it

Accounting
Architectural technology
Business and technology of fashion
Chemical technology
Civil engineering technology
Construction management technology
Computer science
Dental hygiene
Dental laboratory technology
Electrical engineering technology
Electromechanical engineering technology
Industrial design technology
Marketing, management, and sales
Nursing
Ophthalmic dispensing
Paralegal studies
Radiological technology

September 12, 2023September 13, 2023

What’s New in the Library Fall 2023

Welcome to a new semester! And welcome to everyone new to City Tech; we are so excited to see so many new faces on campus.

Need a book, a quiet place to study or work on a project, or research help? The library is open and all of our in person services are up and running.

Come visit us on the 4th floor of the Library building Mondays-Thursdays from 9am-8pm, Fridays from 9am-7pm, and Saturdays from 10am-5pm.

Learning or teaching online? We’ve still got you covered.

Get virtual help 24X7

Off campus or up late working on a project and need help? Just Ask us!

You can chat with CUNY Librarians on weekdays and librarians from other institutions on evenings and weekends.

Access Library Resources from Off-Campus

Use CUNY login credentials to access library databases, research articles, movies, and ebooks from off campus.

Use these same credentials to login to “My Library Account” on the library website. If your preferred name isn’t associated with your library account, you can change that!

Reference

This semester we are open most Saturdays (with the exception of a few holidays closings) , with a librarian available to help you at the Reference Desk. Come see us at the Reference Desk for help with your assignments.

New E-resources

The library is thrilled to now provide access to Fashion and Race, a database that provides access to an incredible collection of resources curated by Kimberly M. Jenkins, an expert in the fashion world who is known for her diversity and equity work. Access the database onsite or offsite at http://cityte.ch/fashion. You’ll be prompted to set up your own login the first time you sign in, and then you can use that any time you return to the database.

Don’t forget to use your City Tech email to sign up for (or renew) your free access to the New York Times and Wall Street Journal. Access expires after a period of time for both students and faculty, but you can always renew it by heading back to the links shared here for free access to the CUNY community.

Course Reserves

You can place textbooks and required readings for your courses in the Library’s Reserve Collection for your students to use in the library.

Please place your requests as soon as possible as we purchase on a first-come, first-served basis. Request materials to be placed on reserve using this form.

Questions? Email us: NYCCTCirculation@citytech.cuny.edu

Longer Book Loans and More Renewals!

As of January 31st, 2023, students can now borrow books from any CUNY library for 8 weeks plus 4 renewals (of 8 weeks each).

All books can be returned in the library or dropped in the Library Book Drop Box located inside 300 Jay Street entrance past the turnstiles on the left side.

Need Something We Don’t Have?

Interlibrary Loan has expanded its services! Faculty, staff, and now students can request books not available at CUNY through ILL—this includes textbooks. We also fill article and individual book chapter requests and deliver them electronically. ILL is great for scholarly research and course assignments.

Your Interlibrary Loan account now uses your CUNY login, so you have one less password to remember! Questions? Email us: interlibraryloan@citytech.cuny.edu

Workshops and Events

The Library offers workshops for faculty, students, and other members of the City Tech community. Our workshops cover a wide range of topics, including basic research skills, finding articles in databases, using other libraries, open access journals, and evaluating websites.

To arrange for a faculty workshop, please contact:
Professor Nandi Prince
nprince@citytech.cuny.edu

Workshops are open to all City Tech faculty and staff! For a list of current offerings, and to RSVP, please check here.

Library Instruction Offerings

Are you assigning papers or projects that require library research? You can request a library instruction session for your in-person or online synchronous class.

Are you teaching asynchronously or want your students to learn research skills at their own pace? Share the library’s tutorials and research guides with your students. The library is automatically embedded in Blackboard courses and you can add library widgets to your OpenLab site.

Contact your library subject specialist to find out more about subject-specific resources and support for your asynchronous class.

For general questions about library instruction, contact Prof. Rachel Jones, library instruction coordinator.

Open Educational Resources

Identify open and free resources to support teaching, browse your colleagues’ contributions, and much more via the OER at City Tech site.

Follow our blog for New & Noteworthy OER available in your discipline.

Questions about assigning OER and other zero-cost resources, creating, and sharing your OER with a wider audience? Contact Cailean Cooney at ccooney@citytech.cuny.edu. You can also request a tailored workshop by filling out this form.

Laptop Loans

In coordination and with support from the ASAP program, the library is offering a limited number of PC laptops for 7 day loan to all City Tech students. Visit the Multimedia Resource Center on the 4th floor to check one out.

Media Browsing

The Multimedia Resource Center has a terrific collection of VHS cassettes, DVDs, Blu-Rays, and vinyl records. We also have Blu-ray players available to borrow! Visit the MRC in the library.

Support for Scholarly Publishing

The library can support your research and scholarship–we regularly offer a publishing workshop series. This semester, learn how to leverage your literature review to identify journals and publishers, how CUNY’s institutional repository, Academic Works … works and how it benefits you as an author, how to use Zotero, a free citation management tool that has many cool features, and lastly, how to set up your Google Scholar profile which not only provides you with citation data about your publications but also helps funders and others easily find your scholarship.

In addition to our Scholarly Publishing Clinic, a monthly office hour for virtual consultations on the first Tuesday of the month at 3 PM, consultations are available on demand. Contact Monica Berger at monica.berger11@citytech.cuny.edu. Learn more about how the library supports scholarly publishing.

Lastly, your library faculty colleagues are busy publishing as well. Read more on our blog about our recent publications and other work.

Library’s 2023-2026 Strategic Plan

Staff and faculty in the library recently completed the 2023-26 strategic plan. The plan helps us make decisions and set priorities about library resources and services to serve the college community. If you completed a survey, participated in a focus group, or provided input or feedback in any way, many thanks! Thanks also to the dedicated library strategic planning working group and data specialists.

Don’t Be a Stranger

Have questions about library resources and services but not sure how to reach us? Want to make sure you get the latest updates about changing policies, new resources, and digital tools available through the library?

Subscribe to the Library Buzz blog to get the latest in your inbox or follow us on Twitter and Instagram @citytechlibrary.

September 12, 2023

Database highlight: LACLI

LACLI provides access to free online resources for Latin American, Caribbean, Latinx, and Iberian studies. This project emerged during the COVID-19 pandemic as an international collaborative effort aimed at sharing digital resource collections across borders, and it is being maintained by collaboration among librarians from the US, Mexico, Brazil, and the UK. It includes a mix of free digital resources in Spanish, Portuguese, and English.

Interested in getting started? Find LACLI on the City Tech Library Database list, or head straight to lacli.info.

Begin your research with the search box on the website’s homepage, or browse the list from the “Library” menu. Some of our favorite resources on LACLI include 68 voces, a series of animated films based on indigenous Mexican stories, and the Alfredo Bouret collection at RMIT University, highlighting the work of fashion illustrator Alfredo Bouret.

August 28, 2023August 28, 2023

Watch now: Making the Impossible Possible: The Story of Puerto Rican Studies in Brooklyn College

We’re excited that friends at the CUNY Graduate Center have made the film “Making the Impossible Possible: The Story of Puerto Rican Studies in Brooklyn College” available for everyone in the CUNY community to watch!

Visit this link to watch the film; if you’re off campus, you’ll be asked to log in first with your CUNYfirst login. This film can be shared in the classroom and screened at any CUNY event that does not charge admission. The Alliance for Puerto Rican Education and Empowerment has also created a study guide for the film.

More about the film: MAKING THE IMPOSSIBLE POSSIBLE tells the story of the student-led struggle to win Puerto Rican Studies at Brooklyn College, CUNY, in the late 1960s. The documentary is a mosaic of voices, film footage, and photographs taken by student activists. This important intergenerational story highlights how students and faculty seized the moment to build upon an alliance of Puerto Rican, African American, and other progressive students forged in their communities and the civil rights movement. Together they changed the face of higher education, transforming the curriculum and expanding who gets educated. The film sheds light on the 50-year history of struggle that started with the founding of one of the first Puerto Rican Studies departments in the nation, and documents the continued movement to maintain their gains.

Directed by Pamela Sporn, Tami Gold, Produced by Gisely Colón López, Tami Gold, Pamela Sporn, Alliance for Puerto Rican Education and Empowerment (New York, NY: Third World Newsreel, 2021), 34 minutes

Special thanks to Alycia Sellie, Roxanne Shirazi, Michael Hughes, and other library workers who contributed to making this film accessible to CUNY.

August 14, 2023

New Database: Fashion & Race

City Tech Library is thrilled to now offer access to Fashion and Race, a database that provides access to books, articles, written profiles and other resources that support study of the intersection between fashion and race.

To get started, visit http://cityte.ch/fashion or select “Fashion and Race” from the Library’s A-Z Database List. If you are off campus, you’ll first be asked to log in with your CUNY login.

The first step for using this database is setting up your own individual login. You’ll see the following registration screen, and you should log in with your City Tech email address and whatever password you’d like:

Once you’ve set up this login, you can use it any time you access the database.

Interested in learning more? Follow Fashion and Race on instagram or check out their podcast, The Invisible Seam.

Questions? Feel free to ask a librarian!

August 3, 2023August 3, 2023

Database Updates: Archives of Latin American and Caribbean History, Sixteenth to Twentieth Century

Formerly known as Gale World Scholar: Latin America and the Caribbean, this database has been reorganized as Archives of Latin American and Caribbean History, Sixteenth to Twentieth Century. Access it through the Library’s A-Z list of databases, at https://cityte.ch/az. You can head straight to this database at http://cityte.ch/wsl

What can you find inside? Use this database to explore more than 1.3 million pages of historical material across 33 archival collections from the United States and Europe, including original manuscripts, signed letters, expedition records, reports, maps, diaries, descriptions of voyages, ephemera, and more from sources such as:

Brazil’s Popular Groups, 1966-1986
Colección de Documentos Inéditos Relativos al Descubrimiento, Conquista Y Organización de Las Antiguas Posesiones Españolas de America Y Oceania. — Madrid : M.B. de Quyros, 1864-1884
Conquistadors: The Struggle for Colonial Power in Latin America, 1492-1825
Despatches From U.S. Consuls in Havana, Cuba, 1783-1906
Latin American History and Culture: An Archival Record, Series 1: The Yale University Collection of Latin American Manuscripts, Parts 1-7
Latin American and Iberian biographies
Latin American Independence: Nineteenth Century Political and Official Pamphlets
Mexican and Central American Political and Social Ephemera
Papers of Agustin de Iturbide, 1799-1880
US State Department records on Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Cuba, Guatemala, Haiti, Mexico and more

(See the website for more info)

If you used this database under its former name, Gale World Scholar: Latin America and the Caribbean, you may be looking for some of the periodicals and reference books included in that database. Those have been moved to Gale’s Dictionary of Literary Biography (http://cityte.ch/litbio) and Gale eBooks (http://cityte.ch/gvrl).

Questions? Feel free to ask a librarian!

May 12, 2023

New Online Library Resources: Dictionary of Literary Biography and Something About the Author

City Tech library now has access to two new online databases: Something About the Author and the Dictionary of Literary Biography. (Those links will ask you to use your CUNY login if you’re off campus.)

Something About the Author provides access to all volumes ever printed in Gale’s Something About the Author book series, which examines the lives and works of authors and illustrators for children and young adults. This includes content from both the main series (over 200 print volumes) and the Something About the Author Autobiography Series, totaling more than 290 volumes, 20,000 entries, and nearly 30,000 images.

The Dictionary of Literary Biography provides reliable information on authors and their works in an easy to understand, engaging format, while placing writers in the larger perspective of literary history.

April 19, 2023April 19, 2023

Biographies in Encyclopedia Britannica

Did you know that the library provides access to online encyclopedias? Wikipedia isn’t the only encyclopedia on the internet these days; check out Encyclopedia Britannica (http://cityte.ch/brit) as a great starting place for your research. (Remember: if you’re off campus, you’ll be asked to use your CUNYfirst login when clicking on the links in this blog post.)

In addition to giving topic overviews, Britannica is also a terrific source for biographies. Not sure why your professor keeps mentioning Freud’s work in your class? Read a quick biography to figure out what Freud’s deal was. Desperate to find a fashion designer to write a paper about? Browse biographies by profession (click under “known for”); you can even limit by nationality, time period, and gender, and then scan the results for some ideas.

A biography in Britannica doesn’t give you all the info (we’d love to add a few more paragraphs to Aaliyah’s, but it’s a great starting point for context and keyword that you can use for further research.

(BRB, we’re reading all about Hypatia now.)

March 28, 2023March 28, 2023

A quick look at library resources for exploring AI

While AI is an ever-evolving field and new technology is available at an increasingly rapid pace, some of the library’s electronic resources can provide a foundation for talking more about how we use AI and how it impacts our everyday lives. We’ve provided a few starting points below; note that all of the links provided will require you to log in with your CUNY ID if you’re not on campus internet.

Opposing Viewpoints in Context is a terrific database for overviews on major issues. Their Topic Overview on AI is a great place to start: in addition to a summary of key concepts and the history of the field, they’ve also provided some critical thinking questions.

Are you interested in some of the concrete impacts AI is currently having? A quick search for “artificial intelligence” in eMarketer pulls up very recent reports on ChatGPT and Generative AI for Social Media Marketing or ChatGPT and Generative AI in Media and Advertising, to name a few. These results also include charts compiling recent poll data on impressions and use of AI.

Looking for scholarly publications on AI? One place to dive deeper is IEEE Xplore. Start with a broad search of journal articles, or head straight to a publication specific to the topic — such as IEEE Transactions on Artificial Intelligence.

For help navigating any of these resources or for taking your research on AI further, please get in touch! Chat with us any time via Ask a Librarian.

March 7, 2023

Spotlight on online resources for International Women’s Day

The library has a wide variety of online resources that celebrate the contributions of women and gender diverse people, and that look at the issues that impact women’s lives. Looking for material to add to your syllabus, sources to cite in your assignments, or just a good read? Check out some of these databases! If you’re off campus, you’ll be prompted to log in with your CUNY login when you click on any of the links below.

Women and Social Movements in the United States,1600-2000 includes primary and secondary sources that help us understand women’s history in the United States, and specifically the contributions that women have made to social movements. It also includes book, film, and website reviews, notes from the archives, and teaching tools. In addition to regular search tools, you can browse this collection by person or social movement. And, explore curated sets of primary sources that can support your research or teaching, such Writings by Black Women Suffragists, 1831-1965, which includes more than 1,900 items written by about 150 Black women suffragists.

North American Women’s Drama contains 1,517 plays by 330 playwrights. Written by women in the United States and Canada from Colonial times to the present, many of these works are rare, hard to find, or out of print. Almost a quarter of the collection consists of previously unpublished plays.

Gale OneFile: Contemporary Women’s Issues provides information on issues that impact women around the globe. I love how Gale OneFile includes a topic finder that helps visualize connections between material included in my search results; clicking on “topic finder” on the home screen takes me to a search box that will provide me with a visual depiction of my search results, for example from this search for “maternal health”:

Gale OneFile: Gender Studies includes material about gender studies, family and marital issues, and more. This database also provides the visually-based topic finder; this time, I started my search instead with the Subject Guides and searched for “health,” which helped me find subject guides for Personal Care Products and Wellness Programs. There’s so much to explore in these databases.

Author: Jen Hoyer