• 2002

The faculty and staff of the A. Philip Randolph Memorial Library wish you and your family a Happy Holiday. May the New Year bring the world peace and prosperity!!!

BMCC has become a member of the Center for Academic Integrity. Baruch and Medgar Evers are the other two CUNY membership schools. The Center serves as a clearing-house for best practices information among institutions of higher education and also offers events and literature. The membership signals the College's commitment to promoting integrity and ethical behavior among students.

Contributions are again solicited for CUNY Campaign 2003 and the BMCC Fund, Inc. This year's campaign theme is "Giving Close to Home" and a gift to the BMCC Fund, Inc. will indeed be giving closest to home and will directly benefit our community. 197 faculty and staff participated in last year's Campaign --making BMCC the highest fund-raising campus in CUNY.

Two helpful fact sheets on the hazards of smoking as well as second-hand smoke from the New York City Department of Health have been reproduced for distribution. Copies are placed in the Information Center Box near the main entrance as well as some in the Lucite holder that is attached to the Reference Desk near computer #1.

Our server problems have been resolved and the remote login to the full text databases is now working.

The BMCC Links Database is available again.

The Library is experiencing server problems at the moment. Several pages are therefore not available.
If you want to access library databases remotely, please use the CUNY E-Journals & Databases page.
The Reference Chat room is not available either, however, you can use the e-mail Reference service.
Until further notice the BMCC Links Database will not be available.

"Harlem On My Mind: Fact and Fiction", the current exhibit at the library, focuses on that world famous New York neighborhood; its history, culture and people. The current hit musical about Harlem, "Harlem Song" which is being performed at the Apollo Theatre on 125th Street and Amsterdam Avenue, a place where many legendary performers got their start, is a focal point of the display. Books about Harlem past and present: the Harlem Renaissance, Harlem during WW II, El Barrio, Harlem in the fiction of Baldwin, Hurston, Petry, Mohr, in the poetry of Langston Hughes and James Weldon Johnson, are all included. The display was organized by Prof. Joan Abelack.

Strategies for Preventing and Detecting Plagiarism.
Wednesday, Sept. 18th: Room S-608, 4-5pm
Thursday, Oct. 10th: Room S-630, 4-5pm
Please call (212) 220-1450 or send an e-mail to mprudlo@bmcc.cuny.edu to sign up.

The new schedule for walk-in classes is out! A list of classes and workshops can be found on the Library Instruction page.

Due to popular demand, the library's Sunday opening hours (12-5 pm) are expected to continue in September 2002.

Our new Help pages are now public with extensive information on our subscription databases, how to find resources, and how to cite and evaluate sources.

"African Americans: 400 Years of Achievement," is the theme of the Library's current exhibit celebrating African heritage Month. Books, photos, and articles showcasing famous names, past and present, who have made major contributions to American life, are featured. Please stop by the Library during the month of February to view the display.

Our online e-Books database (netLibrary) consists of a three-part collection:
The BMCC Library has purchased over 6,000 full-text e-Books, concentrating on titles geared to the colleges’ areas of study as well as subjects of general interest to our students.
The public domain collection, given to us free of charge, contains over 4,000 titles considered classics of literature and history.
The Nylink netLibrary shared Collection, accessible to all the CUNY colleges, consists of over 4,500 electronic texts. This collection, with 900 recently added titles, is particularly strong in business and economics, reference, information and computer science, education, law and consumer health.

It is the library's mission to support faculty and students no matter where they want to use the BMCC library materials. Below is a list of resources for you and your students. For remote access to electronic resources (outside the BMCC building) you will need your BMCC e-mail password and user name.

• Books: we have an open access agreement with the City College Library and you and your students will be able to check out books and utilize reference services there.
• All BMCC electronic library resources can be accessed from the library website
• Full text databases: Current and back issues of journals and magazines for all subjects.
• netLibrary: Full text of thousands of books in electronic form.
• BMCC Virtual Library: 2,000+ links to educational and research Websites
• CUNY+Web: Search for BMCC's (or any other CUNY college's) books, microform, and print journal holdings.
• Electronic Reserves Info: Allows students to access your reserve material in electronic form.
  For help on remote access and the databases:
• http://www.bmcc.cuny.edu/lib/help/help.html
• E-mail reference service: http://lib1.bmcc.cuny.edu/vlib/asklibtemp.html
  
• Contact Prof. Marion Prudlo at (212) 346-8391
• For circulation questions contact Guerda Baucicaut at (212) 346-8610

The Library now subscribes to new databases:

• CQ Researcher explores a current "hot" issue in the news in depth each week. Topics range from social and cultural issues to environment, health, education and science and technology. Every report features comments from experts, lawmakers and citizens on all sides of every issue. Numerous charts, graphs and sidebar articles - plus a pro-con feature, a chronology, bibliographies and a list of contacts - round each report.
• MagillOnAuthors is a reference database comprising information on over 1,500 notable authors, including 10 Critical Surveys and three Magill's Choice series, as well as World Philosophers and Their Works. This database offers approximately 3,000 articles and over 450 images and covers long and short fiction writers, poets, dramatists and philosophers.

An Information Competence Tutorial (http://ols.cuny.edu/tutorial/) is now available. The tutorial is comprised of four modules:

• Determine Your Information Needs
• Define Your Research Topic
• Locate and Retrieve Relevant Information
• Use the Technological Tools for Accessing Information

The Library is about to launch an electronic reserve service to allow patrons to access specified course materials online. Some examples will be course syllabi, sample tests, or articles. The system also has the ability to encourge copyright laws compliance through the use of passwords. Presently we are in the process of identifying willing faculty members to become active partners. Click here to see the startup page.

The College has just received 45 iMacs from Apple, and they will be deployed throughout the Library on the 4th floor. Others will also be used to expand the Cyber Café near the area just off the students cafeteria. These attractive machines will be used as browser-boxes for their simplicity and small foot-print. BMCC is always on the go!

Your Library has instituted a new policy to benefit students who wish to use library services during the summer. Even if you are not registered for Summer School, we will extend borrowing privileges to those who hold a CUNYCard with a Spring 2001 imprint. This will allow students to have a leg up or catch up with "incomplete's".

After careful consideration, CUNY announced the university-wide subscription to EBSCO Academic Search Premier--the world's largest multi-discipline, full text database. It is to replace the familiar Expanded Academic Index. Academic Search Premier contains:

• full text for 3,180 scholarly publications, covering all academic areas of study - including social sciences, humanities, education, computer sciences, engineering, language and linguistics, arts & literature, medical sciences, and ethnic studies.
• abstracts and indexing for 4,150 scholarly journals with many dating back to 1984
• full-page images, as well as color embedded images

Through EBSCOHost BMCC will be offering its students access to CINAHL, ERIC, Medline, PsycINFO and Sociological Abstracts through the same easy to use interface. EBSCO has the ability to link to full text in Academic and Business Search Premier from third party databases (i.e. CINAHL, ERIC, Medline, PsycINFO, Sociological Abstracts) making these publications partially full text.
The EBSCO product is available immediately. To ease the transition Gale's Expanded Academic Index will be available through September 30, 2001.