Bookmark Me@UST Program: Honoring Someone With Books
With a special ceremony officiated by President Paul Chu, the Library has recently launched a program, Bookmark Me@UST, to help enhance the library's book collection during the current time of budget
predicament.
For a $500 donation, a commemorative bookplate bearing the name of the donor and the name of the honoree will be placed in a newly acquired library book in a chosen subject area. For $1000 the donor will be able to select any book from the collection.
While the Library is able to strengthen its book collections with these donations, this program offers members of the University community a unique way of paying lasting tribute to
someone they respect or love on a special occasion, e.g., graduation, promotion, retirement, birthday, or at other times.
The launching ceremony, held on the 23rd of October, was attended by many members of the University community including
administrators, faculty and staff members, students, and HKUST alumni; as well as others from outside of the University. At the
ceremony, a number of faculty members dedicated one of their own publications along with their donation to the special book fund, and a university staff member, student and alumna also dedicated books and made donations to help build up the library collection.
COLLECTION SPOTLIGHT: Collaborative Enhancement
With the rising cost of journal and database acquisitions, and the ever-limited budget, the Library has taken several measures to maintain the collection at a level sufficient to support students'and faculty's teaching and learning.
Eliminating journal subscriptions to reduce cost has become an ongoing exercise among the academic departments and the Library; sharing subscription costs between departments and the Library for some expensive yet essential
databases is another avenue being pursued. One initiative that may be little known to our users is the Library's active participation in the JULAC consortium of the eight UGC member libraries to achieve greater value for the decreasing and limited budget.
The JULAC-CDC (Joint University Librarians Advisory Committee - Collection Development Committee) was formed some four years ago. The initial objective was to concentrate on negotiating the largest discount for high-priced electronic resources. After gaining substantial discounts ranging from 10% to 40% for core databases such as IEEE Xplore, Web of Science, ProQuest and LexisNexis
Academic, the group expanded its scope to include negotiations for e-journal
packages. To heighten its bargaining power, it also started to accept affiliate members including the libraries of the Open University of Hong Kong, the University of Macau and the Academy for Performing Arts.
The libraries have much to gain if the publishers permit participating libraries reciprocal access to each others' journal subscriptions. Let's take the Wiley consortium as an example. Currently, HKUST Library subscribes to 53 Wiley journals. By joining the consortium, with the same payment, users at UST can now access a total of 243 Wiley titles that are subscribed to by HKU, CUHK, PolyU, CityU and others. To optimize our benefit, the next step is for member libraries to start cancelling duplicate subscriptions among each other to free up money for new journals from the same publishers. The Library has similar arrangements for e-journals from Springer and Oxford University Press and will be looking into the possibility of joining Kluwer, Blackwell and Cambridge
University Press consortia in the coming year.
OUR WEB: Subject Guide on Demographic Studies
http://library.ust.hk/guides/demography.html
Where would you look if you wanted to know the birth rate of a country, or the world's ranking of countries by population? Would you look in an almanac, an encyclopedia or on the Internet? Our new subject guide on Demographic Studies will point you to the most relevant resources. To find the answers to the above, you could probably consult World population : a reference handbook (Reference HB871 .G47 2001) or Demographic yearbook, a United Nations publication (Reference HA17 .D45) which gives official demographic data for over 200 countries.
The guide also links you to a variety of important demographic websites.
Examples of metasites are PopNet (http://www.popnet.org/) maintained by the U. S. Population Reference Bureau (http://www.prb.org/) and WWW Virtual Library:
Demography & Population Studies (http://demography.anu.edu.au/VirtualLibrary/). Demography is not just about numbers, it also covers related social, economic and political issues like aging, family planning and migration. To search for literature on various population topics, try Population Index on the Web
(http://library.ust.hk/cgi/db/popindex.pl) (1986-2000). Older volumes (1937-1985) are available via JSTOR (http://library.ust.hk/cgi/db/jstor.pl).
INFORMATION SERVICES: Library Instruction Efforts
The fall term of every year is the busiest time for library instruction. New
students were oriented in the use of Library resources and services by our tours, classes, informational Treasure Hunt, online Information Literacy Tutorial
(http://library.ust.hk/serv/skills/infoliteracy.html) and Self-Guided Library Tour (http://library.ust.hk/guides/selftour/).
Besides new students, many "old" students were introduced to effective and efficient ways of finding information for their course assignments or projects. We offered classes for specific courses such as Biotechnology Seminar / BICH 366 (http://library.ust.hk/guides/bich366.html) and Methods in Chinese Textual Studies /
HUMA 550 (http://library.ust.hk/guides/huma550.html). There were also workshops for particular subject disciplines, such as information research workshops for
students in each of the School of Engineering's six departments. Furthermore, we held workshops on the most frequently-used databases like ProQuest (http://library.ust.hk/guides/pqd.html). Finally, we organized practical workshops to assist students in the job search process (http://library.ust.hk/guides/jobs/jobs.html) and in furthering their studies (http://library.ust.hk/guides/pg.html).
Altogether, over 60 classes and 40 tours have been presented this term. Among these classes, we would like to draw your special attention to our new workshops on the Reuters 3000 Xtra finance database (http://library.ust.hk/guides/reuters.html). Besides providing similar content to the previous finance database Hydra,
Reuters 3000 Xtra is now meeting many other needs of our users. As just one
example, a researcher recently downloaded the daily closing price of all the stocks in Hong Kong since 1980. This would be impossible prior to our obtaining this database. To help our students and staff tap into its richness, ten workshops were offered for various user groups.
How well were our instructional efforts received by attendees? On average, over 85% of our students commented in their evaluations that our workshops would be recommended to others. For example, every evaluation form for our
edutainment game Treasure Hunt commented that it was recommendable to others. Comments included "the questions are very creative" and "It allows
group members to involve in the class actively. This is very important in learning how to use our library in an interesting way".
For Entrepreneurship and Leadership BMGB 301
(http://library.ust.hk/guides/entrepreneurship.html), 92% of the students recommended the workshop to others and two of them wrote: "Very useful. Gave me lot of insights and confidence to start my own business" and "I think the databases are really really useful. I didn't know the existence of these at HKUST Library
SYSTEMS UPDATE: Improved Public Computing Environment
Over the summer, Systems staff were busy implementing a variety of enhancements to the Library's public computing environment. Every public computer was upgraded to some degree, mostly by the inclusion of additional RAM needed to properly support the newer Windows XP operating system. This move to XP was critical in order to support newer Internet technologies, implement upgraded database interfaces, and to provide the needed support structure on staff computers to begin implementing the 'Millennium' modules of our Library Catalog software.
This migration also provides you with a more fully-compliant Unicode-based environment, especially in the Library Computer Laboratory.
Some additional Chinese character input pads have also been installed, and Systems staff are testing the reliability and functionality of USB models for an upcoming expansion in pad-equipped public stations (depending on the budget situation).
If you have any questions or suggestions about the Library's public computing environment, please contact Library Systems at [email protected].
Collection Highlights
If you have walked by the New Acquisitions Shelves on the Ground Floor recently, you may have noticed a new display area labelled "Collection
Highlights". Here you will find selected materials on a different featured topic
each month.
By displaying books and media items on specific themes, Collection Highlights aims to promote reading among the HKUST community and to encourage users to explore subjects that they might otherwise overlook. All of these items may be borrowed. The list of titles being displayed is available on the Library Web server at http://library.ust.hk/res/highlights.html.
For November you can see books, CD-ROMs and videos on the construction, design, maintenance, aesthetics and history of Bridges.
The topic in December will be the Nobel Prizes. Highlighted will be the life and work, biographies and interviews of laureates such as Mother Teresa, Lee Yuan Tseh (李遠哲), Daniel Chee Tsui (崔琦), Gao Xingjian (高行健), John Nash and James Dewey Watson.
January will bring an interesting and inspiring selection of items from our Short Story works. Authors such as Ray Bradbury, John Updike, James Joyce and Jack London will be featured.
New Look for E-Reserve
E-Reserve now provides Web access to all non-copyrighted articles, course lecture notes and other papers placed on Library Reserve. E-Reserve was first implemented in 1995 as a ground-breaking development for Hong Kong. It has since been completely redesigned in-house by library systems staff, and
functions as an integral module of the Course Reserve services offered by the Library.
Material placed on reserve is scanned by library staff to create a digital image which is loaded into the database. New this semester is the ability to view the non-copyrighted material over the Internet. Students can access the full-text from any networked machine with a campus IP address, or from off-campus by using the Library's authenticating proxy server. Journal articles which are
included in the Library's e-journal subscriptions are also directly linked from E-Reserve. Due to copyright restrictions, print journal articles and book chapters which must be scanned by Library staff are still only available from the E-Reserve workstations located on the first floor of the Library.
Faculty are cautioned against including copyrighted material with their course notes, as this will force us to restrict access for the entire package to only the E-Reserve workstations. Copyrighted works should be submitted separately, so the restrictions can be applied to only the appropriate material.
The Course Reserve service, of which E-Reserve is one module, also includes (Closed) Reserve, Open Reserve and Media Reserve. They all contain material that instructors set aside for their students to read, listen, or view. These items may be borrowed for short periods and are in heavy demand. By converting some of these to electronic format and making them easily accessible, students no longer need to compete for these resources.
For more information on Course Reserves see the Library web page at
http://library.ust.hk/serv/course-reserve.html or contact Library Reserve (x6776 or [email protected]).
revised 29 October 2003
