Kresge Engineering Library News
Number 20, May 2007
Jean McKenzie, Editor.
- New Resources
- Collection Budget
- SAE Digital Library
- Camille Wanat Retires
- Staff Update
- Ask Us and Recommendations for Purchase
1. New Resources
These new resources are now accessible from all UC IP addresses.
Journal of Fluid Mechanics Backfile
The JFM backfile covers Volumes 1 - 329 (1956-1996). Links from article databases will soon be enabled; in the meantime, you can browse the list of issues. (Scroll down the page to find the volume list.)
Taylor & Francis Journals
The complete Taylor & Francis online journals collection totals more than 1,000 titles in the sciences, social sciences, and humanities. UC Berkeley already had online access to the Taylor & Francis journals received in print and this extends our access in all subject areas.
ASM Alloy Phase Diagrams Center
The ASM Alloy Phase Diagrams Center provides access to more than 11,000 binary and ternary phase diagrams and associated phase data for more than 2,400 systems. The collection will be updated to include 10,000 binary and 20,000 ternary diagrams. The first update will occur in September and include nearly 18,000 ternary diagrams. See the Introduction to Phase Diagrams for an overview.
Nature Journals
Nature Nanotechnology, v. 1 (2006) — covers all aspects of nanoscience and nanotechnology, including "research into the design, characterization and production of structures, devices and systems that involve the manipulation and control of materials and phenomena at atomic, molecular and macromolecular scales."
Nature Photonics, v. 1 (2007) — coverage ranges "from research into the fundamental properties of light and how it interacts with matter through to the latest design of optoelectronic devices and emerging applications that exploit photons."
SPIE Journals
The Journal of Applied Remote Sensing, v. 1 (2007) — covers the concepts, information, and progress of the remote-sensing community.
The Journal of Nanophotonics, v. 1 (2007) — focuses on the fabrication and application of nanostructures that either generate or manipulate light from the infrared to the ultraviolet regimes.
Both SPIE titles are peer reviewed, online-only journals featuring multimedia (video and audio) content; color images; and rapid, article-at-a-time publication.
UCB faculty, staff and students can also access these resources off campus via the Library Proxy Server. These new resources are, or soon will be, in our catalogs and the Electronic Journals A-Z list.
2. Collection Budget
Collection funding for the Engineering Library has been stable over the past year. The Library has had a flat budget for a number of years and has avoided major collection reductions only through a combination of actions, such as favorable consortial licensing, careful stewardship of one-time funding, and the elimination of print versions of commercially-published journals when online access is secured. However, unless the Library Collections budget receives some inflationary adjustments, we will be facing collection cuts in the coming year. The campus Library system has a new Budget Outlook web page, where you can learn more about these collections issues.
3. SAE Digital Library
UC has encountered licensing problems with the SAE Digital Library, which provided online access to the full text of the technical papers from the Society of Automotive Engineers. It is not clear when or if these issues will be resolved, given SAE's new restrictive license. (UC is not alone in these problems; academic engineering libraries across the country have encountered the same problems and similarly dropped their subscriptions.)
The Engineering Library is committed to working with faculty and graduate students to provide papers as needed. We already own all the papers on microfiche from 1984-2004 (at which point SAE stopped publishing the papers in microfiche). Our microfiche equipment includes the ability to scan and download documents in pdf format. We also have a full set of the SAE Transactions (which includes selected technical papers). We have ordered the 2005 and 2006 papers on CD-ROM and expect to have them installed in the Library within the next week or two, and we are working on a plan to order 2007 papers, as needed, for graduate students and faculty. In the meantime, please speak with a reference librarian if you need help locating SAE papers. More information can be found on the Science & Engineering Libraries News blog.
4. Camille Wanat Retires
I will be retiring July 1, 2007. It's been my privilege to manage the Kresge Engineering Library since 1988. I will miss working with Berkeley engineering faculty and graduate students on a daily basis; there's something about working with the very best in the field that challenges the library to mirror that excellence. My thanks for your support of library services through the years.
Jean McKenzie will be the Interim Head of the Kresge Engineering Library. She has been the Assistant Head of this library for many years, so most of you are already familiar with her excellent work. She can be reached at (510) 643-5575 or "jmckenzi" at "library.berkeley.edu."
— Camille Wanat
5. Staff Update
In January 2007, Brian Quigley was appointed to the position of Head of the Mathematics-Statistics Library. While we miss his services as an engineering librarian, we are very happy that he will continue to be part of the Berkeley campus libraries. Recruitment is in process to fill his former position here at the Engineering Library and we expect to have a new librarian on board this summer. In the meantime, Brian will continue to help out with our reference and instructional services and as the collection specialist for computer science.
6. Ask Us and Recommendations for Purchase