The librarian is: BLOGGING | Journalism Library, Columbia University

The Journalism Library Blog has MOVED! This site is no longer being updated as of July 2009. Come find us at our new location:

https://blogs.cul.columbia.edu/journalism

See you there!

The Journalism School along with the Center for New Media Teaching and Learning created an amazing new reporting resource for RW1 students - an electronic map of New York City that allows students to view census data by neighborhood, election district, etc. To use this resource, and for more information on how to use it, follow the link below (authentication required) -

http://jour6001-000-2008-3.wikispaces.columbia.edu/

New York City’s Department of Health and Mental Hygiene (surely the most excellent name for a health department in all of the U.S.) has just released its 2006 Community Health Profiles. These profiles cover neighborhoods in all 5 boroughs, and also include special reports and maps on topics such as binge drinking, diabetes, and domestic violence. You can search the profiles by zip code, or browse by borough or district. [Thanks to J-schooler Tania Haas for pointing out the update.]

Want to be the first on the scene? Use Gothamist Maps to get a snapshot of police, fire & rescue activity around the 5 boroughs (e.g. “Plane Crash into Building, East 72nd St & 1st Ave”). Then race over there to get the story. Are you witnessing something as it unfolds? If so, you can also contribute to Gothamist’s map.

Hitting the streets of your beat for the first time? Make sure to head out there hungry - both for a great story and a great meal. Some of NYC’s best food never makes it into Zagat’s, so an essential website for learning about your neighborhood’s cuisine is Chowhound. Recently re-designed, Chowhound has discussion boards for food in all areas of New York City. Covering an area in Manhattan? Search the Manhattan board. Covering a beat that’s farther afield? Try the Outer Boroughs board.

Remember that resources like Chowhound thrive on user input, so once you’ve sampled the cuisine your beat has to offer, weigh in with your own comments!

Perhaps you have already been assigned a beat neighborhood, or a community district to cover, and are not sure exactly what a community district is, or where your beat is located? Here are some ways to start discovering your new beat.

Scoping Out Your Beat is a guide with links to some crucial resources, including the Department of City Planning website (which includes Community District Profiles), and the Gotham Gazette’s Community Gazettes section (note that Gotham Gazette uses council district, rather than community district, to organize its site.

Your professor may have mentioned some books available in the Journalism Library, called Community District Needs. These books are published annually by the Dept of City Planning, and there is one volume per borough. We have two sets of the most recent (FY 2007) books at the library.

Please note that the community district profiles posted on the Dept of City Planning website include almost all of the information in the books. What’s missing from the website? The detailed memo from each community board, which spells out what each district needs from the City in terms of improvements and funding. So, if you are going to take a look at the Community District Needs books at the library, no need to photocopy the entire section. Just photocopy the memo, and you can get the rest online!

Welcome to the Graduate School of Journalism, and to Columbia University Libraries. Here are some links for exploring the resources that will help you in RWI.

The Columbia Libraries’ website is your portal to information about the many libraries available at Columbia, as well as your link into thousands of electronic sources of information (newspapers, magazines, scholarly journals, photographs, and more) - information which you won’t necessarily find on Google. The Libraries’ catalog, CLIO, helps you to locate both print and online materials at Columbia.

In terms of getting started on your beat reporting, searching for past news stories on your beat can be accomplished using either LexisNexis or Factiva (access restricted to current Columbia affiliates). If you’d like to dig deeper, ProQuest Historical Newspapers (access restricted to current Columbia affiliates) contains the full text of the New York Times back to 1851! This means you can find out what was happening in your beat neighborhood back then. Or, you can type in a street address and see what interesting events may have taken place there.

For other info on New York City and its neighborhoods, check out the guide, Scoping Out Your Beat. It includes links to a number of important websites with in-depth coverage of relevant social and cultural issues.

An indispensable part of getting to know your beat neighborhood is exploring its public library branch. Public libraries across the US draw local residents for events and group meetings, and in New York, branch libraries of the New York Public Library system (serving Manhattan, the Bronx, and Staten Island), as well as branches of the Queens Borough Public Library and Brooklyn Public Library, often have collections which highlight the unique characteristics of the neighborhoods they serve. If you’re having trouble finding neighborhood newspapers, the local branch library is a good place to start your search.

Before setting out, use the links above to locate your beat’s branch library and most importantly, check its hours of operation! To explore the branch library catalogs, here are some useful links:

LEOPAC is the catalog of the New York Public Library’s branch library system, which is not to be confused with the separate CATNYP catalog, which shows the holdings of NYPL’s Research Libraries. Keep in mind that to check out materials from the branch libraries, you will need a NYPL library card. Apply for one today! It’s a great benefit to take advantage of while you are living in New York City, and it even offers you access to online research databases which you’ll be able to use after graduating, when you no longer have access to Columbia’s resources.

Queens Library’s catalog can be searched from its main website, and Brooklyn Public Library’s catalog can be found here.

If you want to pull up the New York daily schedule from the AP, and are not in a computer lab with access to the ENPS system, just connect to Factiva) (access restricted to current Columbia affiliates).

Once connected, in the “Free Text” box at the top, just type the words

ny day schedule

exactly as they appear above. Insert no punctuation, quotation marks, search connectors or parentheses.

BEFORE running the search, look at the “More Options” section, towards the bottom of the screen. Make sure that the option to exclude “obituaries, sports, calendars” has not been checked (if it has, just un-check it).

Please note that the AP ENPS system in the labs is not a library resource, so questions about ENPS should be directed to the J-school technical team via trouble@jrn.columbia.edu.

If you are looking for the calendar of the NY courts, see this link.

How clean are the streets in your beat neighborhood? Has the murder rate been falling, or increasing? How many 311 calls have come in? Answer these questions and many more with My Neighborhood Statistics, an interactive tool from the Mayor’s Office of Operations. The data is searchable by street address or intersection.

Another interactive site, NYC OASIS, is a product of the New York City Open Accessible Space Information System Cooperative, and enables you to create maps of open space, identify natural resources and landmarks, and even model “what-if” scenarios.