University Archives 10th Anniversary!
Functioning as the institutional memory of the University, the University Archives will soon be celebrating its 10th anniversary. These years also saw an ambitious initiative to revolutionize access to archival documents by introducing the very first Digital Archives in Asia that provides fulltext searching and displaying capability to a wide spectrum of university records based on users' authorizations (http://library.ust.hk/archives/). It now also offers access to most of the major university publications including academic calendars, Genesis and the HKUST Newsletter. We were gratified to learn that some of our overseas alumni were able to use the course information in the retrospective academic calendars to fill out applications for their postgraduate studies.
In addition to the digital files available, we have, over the years, identified and accumulated over 600 linear feet (200 book shelves) of documents that are of historical value. These were acquired through extensive networking with more than 50 departments, offices and centres of the University. They include over 35,000 photos and slides, a large number of videorecordings and artifacts that capture the memorable events of the University — all part of the Archives collection.
To commemorate the 15th anniversary of the University, the University Archives plans to mount an exhibit displaying a large variety of documents, photos and artifacts including the very first handwritten ledger used by the Finance Office in Tsimshatsui, photos of memorable milestones including the site foundation of the campus and significant historical documents.
To reminisce on our past together, we are appealing for each individual of the University community to lend us pictures and artifacts that can take us back to the early days. Contact Ms Kelly Yiu at 2358-6783 during office hours or email [email protected] and let us know what you would like to contribute to the upcoming exhibition. We will take good care of your items and return them to you after the exhibition.
COLLECTION SPOTLIGHT: New Standards Resources
BSI and ASTM — To assess the usage of standards in the Library, a survey was conducted from August to December. Anyone who asked about standards at the Reference Counter was asked to complete a short questionnaire. Of the responses received, 70% of users were from the Department of Civil Engineering and EMO's Building Services. The pattern of usage was 53% BSI, 16% ASTM, 10% ISO and 21% others including IEEE standards which are available via IEEE Xplore. Balancing the budget situation and our users needs, it was decided to subscribe to the Civil Engineering and Building Subcomponent of BSI standards on DVD and acquire the latest set of ASTM standards on CD-ROM.
These two databases are now available on the standalone Standards Station in the Database Room on the Library ground floor. Together they contain the full images of over 16,500 standards in civil engineering, building and materials. Users can perform searches by standard number as well as words in the title or the abstract. The retrieved full documents, which are in PDF format, can be printed, saved or emailed as attachments.
EBSCOhost — In the December issue of the newsletter, we informed you of the new subscription to the EBSCOhost database and described some of the specific features and scope of the product. This time, we bring you the news that the Library has successfully loaded all the EBSCOhost records - close to 14,000 of them - to the library catalog. This means you can now employ a single search from the catalog to find the EBSCOhost contents by title, by subject/type or by keywords. You should be aware that, in addition to over 5,400 full-text scholarly journals, there is also extensive coverage of business sources embedded in the database including close to 4,000 Industry profiles, 1,800 SWOT analyses, 1,300 Country reports, 400 Market research reports and close to 100 Case studies.
Distinguished Lecture Series
The Library jointly presented two of HKUST's 15th Anniversary Distinguished Lectures with OUDPA and the Man Hong Kong International Literary Festival in March.
Armand Leroi, winner of the Guardian First Book Award in 2004 and a Reader in Evolutionary Development Biology at Imperial College London, gave a lecture on Mutants: On the Form, Varieties and Errors of the Human Body, in which he argued that no human is genetically perfect and each of us is indeed a mutant. Tom Standage is technology editor at The Economist magazine and author of four history books. In his lecture The Real Digital Divide, he shared his ideas on how developing countries can benefit from information technology to achieve significant economic growth.
These lectures were open to the public and were very well-attended. Each was followed by a guided tour of the Special Collections Room of the Library, which has over 100 first or precious editions of publications in science and technology dating back over five hundred years.
The following are some of the books written by the two speakers. Mutants : on genetic variety and the human body (QM691 .L47 2003)
The Neptune file : a story of astronomical rivalry and the pioneers of planet hunting (QB36.A2 S73 2000) The Turk : the life and times of the famous eighteenth-century chess-playing machine (GV1447 .S74 2002) The Victorian Internet : the remarkable story of the telegraph and the nineteenth century's on-line pioneers (HE7631 .S677 1998)
Institutional Repositories: Sharing Experiences among JULAC Libraries
Following the launch of the HKUST IR in 2003, several other UGC-funded institutions have implemented or have plans to implement their own IR. The Library hosted a one-day workshop on February 24 to provide a platform for exchanging experiences. The workshop "Managing Scholarly Assets in Institutional Repositories: Sharing Experiences among JULAC Libraries" drew 70 colleagues from eight local tertiary institutions.
Representatives from the libraries of the Chinese University, City University, University of Hong Kong and HKUST shared their plans and strategies in starting their IRs. The presentations and discussions raised pertinent issues that are commonly faced by all libraries: software selection, technical enhancements, content coverage and recruitment, authority control of authors' names, usage statistics, promotion and outreach to university administrators and faculty, etc.
The group also looked into possible collaborative opportunities among libraries such as cross-institutional searching of all the local IRs.
For more details, please visit http://library.ust.hk/info/other/feb2006/.
E-Resources for HKUST Alumni
The Library offers the Alumni E-Resources service to all HKUST alumni. This provides remote access to selected library databases for personal and non-commercial use.
Databases available are Cambridge Scientific Abstracts, China Infobank, Gale Encyclopedias, Lexis-Nexis Academic, and ProQuest. Together they provide the full-text and abstracts of thousands of journals, magazines, newspapers, reports, dissertations, encyclopedias, plus legal and statistical sources. There is also free access to many quality resources evaluated and selected by our librarians, such as the HKUST Institutional Repository, which includes digitized theses of our doctoral students.
This service is operated on a cost-recovery basis. The annual fee is $250, and the semi-annual fee is $150. A 20% discount is offered to members of the HKUST Alumni Association or to anyone holding an HKUST Alumni Credit Card. The current subscription year ends on 30 June.
will be announced on the Library website. For more information, please inquire at the Reference Counter or visit the page at http://library.ust.hk/serv/alumni.html.
To access these databases, alumni must use their HKUST Alumni email account, which is provided free to all graduates by OUDPA. See the Alumni website at http://www.alumni.ust.hk/ for details of how to activate your e-mail account.
Honor Your Special One with the Bookmark Me@UST Program
With the end of the term coming up, some of you may be looking for gifts or ideas to thank your favorite teachers/mentors, beloved relatives or special friends. Why not consider the Library's Bookmark Me@UST program to thank them for what they have done and to show them how much they are appreciated?
With a donation of $500, your name and the name of someone you would like to honor will be printed on an exquisite bookplate which will be affixed to a new book in the Library. A donation of $1,000 will even allow you to choose your favorite book in the library collection. Your dedicated book will be kept in the Library and read by many for years to come.
And what is more, your participation in this program is especially treasured and valued. Every donation you make to this program will be used to purchase library materials that will help enhance the library collection. This is important when the Library is facing rapidly rising costs for journals and databases, and is in need of financial support to enhance its capabilities to meet future challenges.
Since its launch in October 2003, the program has received enthusiastic response from students and graduates. Many of them dedicated books to their teachers and relatives whom they love and respect, or to celebrate a happy occasion including graduation, wedding and birthday. Visit the library website at http://library.ust.hk/bookmarkme or pick up the "Bookmark Me@UST" leaflet in the Library to make a donation now. For enquires, e-mail [email protected] or call 2358-6707.
INFORMATION SERVICES: Survey for Online Guides
Subject guides can be a very useful starting point to check what types of resources are available on a certain topic. Each guide lists core sources (print, electronic and quality free Internet resources) of that topic and call numbers and subjects for locating relevant Library collections.
The Library has compiled 140 online subject and course guides targeted to the research and/or study needs of our users (http://library.ust.hk/res/subj-guides.html). Some are related to the University's high-impact areas such as Nano-technology, some are designed for a specific course like Bioinformatics (BISC 358) and some are for hot topics like Doing Business in China. These guides are used heavily by both HKUST and non-HKUST users. Between May 2004 and April 2005 they were accessed 646,809 times, with 11% of the accesses (72,541 hits) from on-campus. Though these statistics are very encouraging, we are looking for ways to further improve the subject guides.
Hence, to find out the information needs of our users and how we can better serve these needs, a short online survey was designed to collect feedback and suggestions. Next time when you access a subject guide, look for the blue, rotating smiley icon which says "Comment on this guide" in the top right corner of the page. Clicking on either the icon or the words will display the survey which takes less than a minute to fill in.
Library Named After Dr Lee Shau Kee
Prominent business leader and philanthropist Dr Lee Shau Kee has made a donation of $33 million to the University, and this donation has attracted a dollar-for-dollar matching grant from the Government. In recognition of Dr Lee's generous support, the University Council has agreed to name the Library the "Lee Shau Kee Library".
Dr Lee Shau Kee is the Chairman of Henderson Land Development Company Limited. He is also a Founding Court Member and an Honorary Graduate of HKUST.
Data collected from this survey will greatly help us improve the content and design of subject guides. We also welcome other suggestions on new topics, where best to list the guides, etc. It is very convenient: spare a minute, share your view!
OUR WEB: WebBridge Phase 2
The Library is pleased to announce that IN-COMING links in the HKUST WebBridge installation have been activated. This will link you directly from the main online subscription databases to full-text articles in any online journal subscriptions.
Outgoing links show up when a user searches the HKUST Library Catalog and clicks on the WebBridge icon — these take information from your search or from the displayed record and plug it into URLs to search subscription databases and e-journals. It also provides links to other Internet resources where you might find more useful information.
Incoming links show up when you are in a remote database, which displays the WebBridge icon with our University logo. These are links which take information from a remote article citation and pass it to our OpenURL server, which tries to determine if we have a subscription to that article in full text, and then presents matching full-text link options for you. If no full-text link is available, it can also pass the citation to the ILLiad system for an ILL request. Other links which might be useful range from a library catalog search (we might even have that article in print!) to keyword searches of several open access repositories for related information.
When you see the incoming HKUST WebBridge icon give it a click to see what we are talking about!
SYSTEMS UPDATE: e-Journals Database
While all of the electronic journals are included in the Library Catalog, for several years we have extracted those records into a separate database to provide a more convenient alternative for you to see what e-journals are available.
With some new subscriptions including EbscoHost and NetLibrary, Library Systems staff found in tests that the database system would be too slow. So we decided to migrate it to the same DSpace software used for the HKUST Institutional Repository and some other projects. Projects using DSpace are more scalable, and the new e-journals database is noticeably faster despite the increased number of e-journals listed.
A Quest for Harmony — Stencil Prints by Yu Ping & Ren Ping 民樂、鄉情、校園 — 于平、任憑漏印版畫展 為慶祝科大建校十五周年，圖書館將於4月13日起展出于平、任憑夫婦的漏印版畫作品。 此次展出的漏印版畫，除了一幅大型作品《媽祖聖跡圖》之外，其它作品基本上分為民樂、鄉情及校園三個系列。《民樂系 列》是以中國古代及民間樂器為主題，體現中國民樂的風韻。《鄉情系列》是以鄉間的日常生活及田野所見的花草動物為主 題，表現了鄉間田野的生活情趣。《校園系列》是藝術家為慶祝本校十五周年而特別創作的。作品以香港科技大學校園有代表 性的景觀為素材，並加入了作者的想像及生活原素，充份表現了藝術家的創作精神及技藝的出神入化。 展覽將於4月12日下午4時30分開幕。兩位藝術家將出席開幕儀式及於當日下午2時15分在圖書館地下一樓教室舉行《漏印版畫 創作示範》，歡迎有興趣人士參加。詳情可致電2358-6707或瀏覽圖書館網頁 http://library.ust.hk/info/exhibit/ping-2006/
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last modified 03 April 2006 © HKUST Library
