Engineering
FEATURE
Some developments for engineers to look out for
l IEEE has recently worked with MIT to launch the MIT Press eBooks Library – Computing and Engineering Collection, which includes more than 400 e-books. The society is also converting much of its back files to HTML. Almost 200,000 HTML articles are expected to be available by early 2013. The new HTML presentation format allows users to engage with and better utilise elements such as figures, equations and multimedia files; quickly scan article contents via a new “Quick Preview” feature; navigate through article sections; and see related articles.
figures; awareness of the newest technologies; accurate information for benchmarking existing technologies; and recent and historic pricing trends for certain chemicals.
According to Chris Forbes, CEO of Knovel, ‘In industry, the journal doesn’t see much use. Papers are seen as “interesting ideas but not commercially useful now”. Engineers in industry are looking to solve problems, so they are not so interested in something at an experimental phase.’ Ben Ramster
of ICE Publishing agreed:
‘Practitioners are very interested in reading about lessons learned and challenges overcome on “real” projects. They are less interested in academic research where an author cannot demonstrate the impact of his work for the profession today. Academics are, to generalise, interested in reading broad and timely research delivered to their desktop.’ IEEE’s Hawkins observed that these differences have an impact on the role of information professionals working with engineers: ‘A wise corporate librarian once told me that he saw running a corporate library as a bit like running a convenience store. His users need the content that will help solve a specific problem when they are working on that problem. They may even pay a premium to get that information quickly, but they don’t need the library to stock a very broad range as long as they can reach out and get what they need in a timely way. Academic libraries on the other hand, particularly at major research universities, see themselves as the keepers of the full range of scholarly output in their topics of interest. They
www.researchinformation.info
‘Engineers in industry are looking to solve
problems, so they are not so interested in something
at an experimental phase’ Chris Forbes
are very concerned with completeness, and protecting the legacy of scholarly information,’ she explained.
And academic usage also depends on whether the academic is using the information as part of teaching or research. Whatever the environment is, however, some issues are common across engineers and indeed across researchers more generally. ‘Ease of access and navigation are paramount. If researchers can’t get to content efficiently and ascertain its relevance quickly, chances are they’ll move on to something else. Therefore, searches, wherever they are conducted, need to yield highly-relevant results,’ commented Pepper of SPIE, who added that while PDFs are still the mainstay, technical information is increasingly available in HTML format.
Human interaction Conference
proceedings are highly-
regarded sources of information on the latest developments in engineering. ‘They provide
l In January, SPIE is launching a new programme that provides gold open access upon publication for a journal article for which authors or their institutions pay modest voluntary page charges. The society plans, during 2013, to add an additional 20,000 new conference proceedings and journal articles as well as 15 to 20 new e-books to the more than 375,000 entries already in the SPIE Digital Library. SPIE also plans to continue to develop and upgrade its mobile technologies including several SPIE apps.
l Knovel has just ‘rewritten all its code from ground up,’ according to Chris Forbes. The company will be releasing a new platform that is completely API driven, which will help it be integrated into workflows.
l ICE journals will further investigate mobile technologies in 2013. The society is also launching two new ICE Science journals. The titles to join the journal portfolio will be called Green Materials and Surface Innovations.
l When the next release of Engineering Village (EV) from Elsevier comes out in July 2013, this engineering abstracting and indexing database will be on the same access systems as Scopus and ScienceDirect. This is expected to increase interoperability between the products and give users the ability to have a single sign-on when accessing the products. The publisher will also continue to add content in all engineering disciplines. One of the main content projects is to add more engineering conference proceedings. The company is currently testing functionality that will use both the EI Thesaurus and cumulative search data to auto-complete searches on EV. The team believes that this will make EV more useful to users of all levels.
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