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CUNY Libraries’ Data Retention Policy
The CUNY Libraries’ Circulation Committee deliberated the issue of privacy and confidentiality of patron records, resulting in the creation of a Data Retention Subcommittee. The subcommittee consisted of six members representing five CUNY Libraries as well as the Office of Library Services (OLS). The subcommittee noted that CUNY has a policy pertaining to record retention:
The CUNY Records Retention and Disposition Schedule indicates the minimum length of time that college and University officials must retain records before the records may be disposed of legally. This Schedule is meant both to ensure that records are retained as long as required for administrative, legal, and fiscal purposes, and to encourage the systematic disposal of records that are no longer needed.
The Data Retention Subcommittee, as well as the CUNY Circulation Committee, determined that the record retention policy did not address particular records associated with the work of the Circulation librarians and staff; thus the Circulation committee convened and decided to provide recommendations on these specific issues to the Council of Chief Librarians. The recommendations are listed in the complete CUNY Libraries’ Data Retention Policy.
New look for the CUNY Libraries website!
With help from our friends in the CUNY Office of University Relations, the Office of Library Services’ website is now looking better than ever!
Not only is it more visually pleasing, but the content has been revised and the site tree trimmed. It should now be easier than ever to peruse the website and find the information you need, such as the Office of Library Services’ contact information, links to CUNY-wide e-resources, and information about the individual CUNY libraries.
On top of that, the website is fully responsive, too, so it molds to the constraints of your device! Further, it has been redesigned with accessibility in mind so it is now more navigable and practical for all of the site’s many visitors. (We average about 18,000 visits a month—that’s 640 visitors a day! Now everyone will be able to make the most of the website.)
If you come across any problems, please do not hesitate to the contact the CUNY Service Desk.
How To | Dynamic feedback links in Digital Commons documents
At the beginning of this year, we announced a new feature in our institutional repository: a feedback form. It’s used to gather input from users of the repository to understand how access to these works benefits them:
If you’re running a repository using bepress’s Digital Commons and want to implement this feature, read on!
(more…)
Popular OneSearch Searches: March 2016
The following is a list of the top OneSearch search term at each campus (and the CUNY-wide OneSearch instance) between 03/01/2016 and 03/31/2016, organized by the number of times the query had been searched at that library:
- “social media” (275)
- 50 essays (169)
- “thirty years war” (112)
- jane austin (103)
- phillips “urban social work” (86)
- “gun control” (84)
- room key (83)
- adhd / children / education (79)
- the irish holocaust (63)
- carolyn rovee-collier (61)
- social mobility / united states (57)
- factory workers (54)
- souls of black folk (43)
- soylent green (38)
- water (37)
- poverty / poor / accountant* (31)
- youth video games (26)
- college readiness (23)
- english only (18)
- asian american career development: a qualitative analysis (10)
- america dancing (7)
- “cambridge associates” (4)
(The slashes indicate that the keywords were entered into individual search boxes on the Advanced Search screen.)
When we performed the top search in that library’s instance of OneSearch, we found some interesting audiovisual material, including a lot of news coverage about the role of social media during natural disasters (such as Hurricane Sandy) and social revolutions (such as the Arab Spring).
If you haven’t explored all that OneSearch has to offer, what are you waiting for!?
How is the “Journal” filter in OneSearch populated?
When you click on the “Journal” facet after doing a search, it almost always displays about 20 journal titles. However, in a search with thousands of results, you are obviously retrieving many more journals than that. And it doesn’t look like it’s the top 20 journals, either, because some of the hits for the same title are quite low. So what’s going on?
Most facets are created dynamically from search results. The 200 top-ranked records in a search result are used to create the list of facet values which will display in the “Expand My Results” section. All hits in the search results for those values are counted and the number is displayed in parentheses to the right of the facet value. So, really, it is not the 20 most common journals in the result, it is (at least in theory) the 20 most relevant journals.
Furthermore, the “Journal” facet includes newspaper titles, too, since it’s really a category consisting of serials. The resource type “Newspaper Articles,” on the other hand, refers to just articles within newspapers and “Articles” refers to articles in journals and other periodicals. Material types depend on the way the content is cataloged, whether it is by local catalogers (in the CUNY Catalog and CUNY Academic Works) or by the vendor (in the Primo Central Index).
