饒宗頤教授惠賜墨寶
為感謝饒宗頤教授惠賜墨寶，校 長朱經武教授與校董會同仁，在 頒發文學榮譽博士學位給饒教授 同一天，於圖書館舉行了一個答 謝儀式，感謝饒教授對科大的隆 情厚意。 這位令香港得以從"文化沙漠"名 單上除名的國學大師，他的學問 根基原來是扎根於家中的小圖書 館--"天嘯樓"藏書閣。這個小圖 書館，開展了饒教授廣博的研究，包括文學、史學、敦煌學、甲骨學、考古學等。他的學 術貢獻蜚聲國際，在梵文、佛學、書畫各方面都有極深的造詣。 誠如校長在答謝儀式上所說：享譽國際、足跡遍佈中外著名學府的饒教授選擇定居香港， 是香港人的福氣。饒教授的墨寶存在圖書館，是圖書館的榮幸。待會你來圖書館的時候， 記得要駐足畫廊，品味這篇筆法跌宕有致的《憶舊遊》。INTERNET: Sound Resources
Have you ever thought of livening up your Web pages, email messages, presentations or social functions with some special sound effects? Almost any sound you can imagine is on the Web: Tarzan's yell, Jedi knights' light sabers, snoring, applause, water boiling, lightning, corks popping, doorbells, the evil laugh of a witch, and sounds made by musical instruments, animals, birds or insects. So where can we find such interesting sounds? One free site that offers sound effects as well as musical instrument samples is FindSounds (http://www.findsounds.com/).
At the FindSounds search engine you can type in keywords to find audio files labeled with one of your keywords or you can browse from FindSounds' 16 subject categories. Searches can also be limited by file type (aif, wav or au), number of channels (mono or stereo) and file size (16K to 2MB).
The result display page shows you colored graphs of the sound wave, file size, duration and links to the page containing the sound file. FindSounds provides a "Find sound like this one" button for each file where you can click to find similar sounds on the Web; thus, files that lack a descriptive label and fail to be retrieved by a text search can be located.
Collections of different sound effects are also available from SoundAmerica
(http://www.soundamerica.com/), A1 Free Sound Effects (http://www.a1freesoundeffects.com/noflash.htm) and Partners In Rhyme (http://www.partnersinrhyme.com/). More sites can be found by different search engines using keywords like "free sound effects" or "public domain sound effects".
Remember to check the site's copyright statement or any conditions/guidelines on use before downloading the audio files - you don't want to infringe on others' copyrights or use others' work inappropriately.
ScienceDirect - Now Available
After "a" consultation with HKUST faulty and a lengthy negotiation with Elsevier, the Library reached a decision to switch the Elsevier journal subscriptions from print to electronic access in 2004. Contract negotiation began intensely in November 2003 and is now in the final stage of ironing out the minor details. The agreement, covering a three-year period from 2004 to 2006 inclusively, will provide HKUST users online access not only to our 380 current subscriptions, but also access to the content of the current year plus four year backfile of the entire "Freedom Collection".
The ScienceDirect Freedom Collection (http://library.ust.hk/cgi/db/sci-direct.pl) includes over 1,800 scholarly journals in a wide range of disciplines published by Elsevier, Academic Press, JAI, North-Holland, Pergamon and others. Roughly, we estimated that even if we take out the 400 and some clinical journals our users will still have access to over 1,000 additional high-quality scholarly journals. Reviewing the latest journal request submissions, we noted that two of the new requests, "Automation in Constructions" from Civil Engineering and "International Journal of Industrial Organization" from Economics were both included in the "Freedom Collection". While we are still in the final stage of negotiation, Elsevier has agreed to provide HKUST users access to these 1,800 journals on a trial basis.
New journals to be published by these publishers will be added to the "Freedom Collection" automatically and users will have seamless access to them at any given time. We invite you to frequently browse your respective subject areas in ScienceDirect to discover new titles that would be pertinent to your needs.
Recently, in an effort to reduce the overall expenditure and to ensure that our users will benefit from access to any new journals published by major publishers and professional associations, the Library also made the decision
to switch the following six package subscriptions from print plus online to e-access only - American Society of Chemistry (ACS), American Society of Mechanical Engineering (ASMC), American Society of Civil Engineering (ASCE) and Oxford University Press (OUP).
MEDIA: Weather & Climate
The last couple of years have seen global extremes in weather. This past summer a terrible heat wave in Europe made it the hottest summer ever recorded, while summer 2002 was the second hottest ever recorded in Hong Kong. Is this global warming or just normal fluctuations in weather? What are normal weather fluctuations, and what causes them?
Weather Fundamentals (Media Resources QC863.5 .W43 1998 v. 1-6) covers weather topics in a very basic manner. It is useful for those of us who have forgotten some of the basics we learned as children: weather patterns around the world; different types of clouds, how they form, and their role in weather and the water cycle; rain and snow; and how hurricanes and tornadoes form. For a more sophisticated look at such topics, consider The Physics of Weather (Media Resources QC881 .P497 1992)
The Climate machine (Media Resources QC928 .C55 1990) explains various meteorological phenomena such as hurricanes, tornadoes, storms, and drought and discusses factors that have a global effect on temperature. Child of the climate (Media Resources QC861.2 .C45 1990) explores the relationship between human civilization and climatic change and the role of climate on various historical events.
The Science of Climate (Media Resources QC981.8.C5 S35 1997) looks at some of the natural and man-made causes of climate change and how it could affect our lives. What's Up with the Weather? (Media Resources QC981.8.G56 W43 2000) investigates whether or not recent changes in the weather arise from human activities manifested as global warming and the greenhouse effect. Winds of change (Media Resources T173.8 .I56 1996 ep.9) examines the evidence which suggests the earth's climate is being altered by humans.
OUR WEB: Fine-tuning Database Groups
Currently, the Library Web site groups database listings under six broad categories: Business & Management, Engineering, Humanities & Social Sciences, Science, Miscellany and News. To help our users identify the databases most specific to their research areas, we saw the need to fine-tune the broad subject listings by subdivisions. Take Science as an example - its listing includes 75 titles. Some are general science databases; some have a specific subject focus like chemistry, while others are patent databases. If you are a novice, it may take you a while to wade through the whole science
listing and single out those that are intrinsic to your needs.
The revamped database groupings will be something like this: once you go into the Science page, you will find prominent links for the science subdivisions, such as Biology & Biochemistry, Physics, Material Safety Data and Patents & Standards. Databases that cover all fields of science will appear on the main Science page, and they will not be duplicated in the subdivision listings. The layout will be very similar to that of the free "Internet Resources" on the Library homepage. Miscellany as a broad database category will disappear altogether, replaced by a new category Reference Tools which gathers titles that are basically reference in nature: dictionaries and encyclopedias, directories or general statistics.
The design is highly intuitive and should enhance your research process. The complete alphabetical list of databases will remain as it is. The new presentation will be in place very soon. It's the Lunar New Year after all when everything wears a new face.
SYSTEMS UPDATE: Unicode in the Library Catalog
The Library is very pleased to announce that our ongoing efforts working with Library Catalog software vendor Innovative Interfaces, Inc., along with some of our colleagues in the various UGC Libraries, to improve the Unicode capabilities of the Catalog software have been quite successful.
You may recall that last Spring, the Catalog was enhanced to support Unicode searching, and our Library provided buttons in the main interface for switching between the Big5 and Unicode interfaces (see http://library.ust.hk/info/notes/notes48.html). There were still some problems, however, especially relating to the correct searching and retrieval of Chinese characters with multiple character mappings and different forms (e.g. simplified versus traditional). As a result, the Big5 interface remained our default access point, especially for off-campus users.
With the recent improvements in the Catalog software we have now made the Unicode interface the default entry for all access to the HKUST Library Catalog. The Big5 interface will remain available for those who prefer it, but we expect this to be an ever-smaller group.
What does this mean for you? In the Unicode interface you can: see the actual characters of the materials being cataloged, regardless of the language or character system (romanized forms of non-English information will also be available); searching and retrieval will more accurately handle alternate character forms, such as simplified and traditional Chinese characters.
These developments were an outgrowth of the work of the Unicode Project working group of the Joint University Libraries Advisory Committee (JULAC), which is working closely with Innovative in their upcoming move to a fully-Unicode database structure, with its own additional complications in character relationships.
If you have any questions about these developments, you may contact Library Systems staff at [email protected].
XML-based Library Workshop
XML (eXtensible Markup Language) is fast gaining favor as the universal format for data storage and exchange. HKUST Library has recognized its potential for libraries as early as 1998 and began adopting this powerful language in marking up information for various digital library projects.
In order to share our knowledge and experience in this area, we organized a Workshop on XML-based Library Applications for library workers in Hong Kong in November 2003. The objectives were to introduce XML technologies and their potential for libraries, and to share our experiences from applying this technology to our projects. In particular, we wished to show how multi-script and hierarchical information of personal and corporate names can be effectively represented using XML, as in our XML Name Access Control Repository (http://library.ust.hk/info/nac/).
We originally planned to hold the Workshop on only one day. But because of the overwhelming response, we had to repeat the Workshop to accommodate
Remote Access Statistics
In the first full year in which authenticated off-campus access to Library subscriptions was available, the server handled over 5 million requests for thousands of different resources. Even more impressive, over 4,300 HKUST users have accessed the service (with many using it frequently - over 1,000 users in December)!
By far the most heavily accessed resources are ProQuest and WiseNews, followed by ACS e-journals, IEEE Xplore, LexisNexis Academic, Web of Science, Ovid, ScienceDirect and others.
Also very interesting is that off-campus access to the E-Reserves in November and December accounted for the highest use of this database - more than the next ten accesses combined. For more details of cumulative and monthly access, please visit our statistics page at http://library.ust.hk/usage/
more attendance requests. Even with this, both workshops (Nov. 21 and 25) were oversubscribed and we had to send out an announcement to formally close the registration. More than 150 participants from 24 different organizations came to the Workshop, with 60 of them joining a hands-on session (attendance restricted due to equipment limitations). Based on the comments and evaluations collected from the participants, we are pleased to know that they found both sessions very useful and well presented.
The Workshop was conducted by the Systems and Cataloging staff of HKUST Library. Presentations were made to cover these topics: Introduction to XML, XML and Library Metadata, XML and INNOPAC, XML Tools and Protocols, and Library Applications. A demonstration with hands-on practice was offered in the afternoon to give participants an opportunity to create an XML document, apply an XSLT style sheet to it, retrieve a Library Catalog record in XML, transform an XML bibliographic record into MARC XML, and work with our XML Name Access Control System.
All the Workshop materials are available online for those who are interested: http://library.ust.hk/xmlworkshop/.
revised 29 January 2004 © HKUST Library
