Issue No. 63 February 2007 http://library.ust.hk/
Table of Contents
A Very Successful HKIUG Annual Meeting
Collection Spotlight: Springer e-book Collection and Wiley eMRWs Information Services: Eureka!
Course Reserve Improvements for Spring!
Systems Updates: Security in the Catalog and a Wireless expansion Media: Scholarly Societies' & Industrial Associations' videos An Update on the Open Access Movement
Information Commons: A very well-received service facility
A Very Successful HKIUG Annual Meeting
Over 340 library professionals from Hong Kong, Macau, Mainland China, Japan, Philippines, Thailand and the United States attended the 7th Annual Hong Kong Innovative Users Group Meeting at the HKUST campus on 11-12 December.
Jointly organized by the Group and the Library, the Meeting began with a welcoming speech by Dr. David Mole, Associate Vice-President for Academic Affairs. Professor Ching-chih Chen from Simmons College delivered the keynote speech on Global Memory Net, a platform for advancing digital collaboration. Speakers from member libraries and overseas institutions shared their experiences and ideas on their implementation of Innovative Interfaces, Inc.'s Millennium products and other information technology applications. Participants discussed a variety of issues during the concurrent discussion sessions.
To celebrate the HKIUG's 10th Anniversary, a total of eight Special Awards were presented during the Meeting to honor active supporting members and institutions. The Meeting ended successfully with the closing remarks given by Dr Samson Soong, the University Librarian, who reiterated the need for librarians "to continue to work with each others, individually and collectively, so that our library users can continue to benefit from our good works." It is based on this
spirit that the Group was established ten years ago.
Presentations are available on the HKIUG Meeting website at http://hkiug.ln.edu.hk/meetings/am2006/.
Collection Spotlight: Springer e-book Collection and Wiley eMRWs
The successful application of a UGC grant in the summer of 2006 for the Electronic Resources Academic Library Link (ERALL) project enabled the JULAC libraries to aggressively acquire perpetual access to several major e-book packages. In this issue, we will explore two of them - the Springer e-book collection and Wiley's eMRWs.
Springer, including the former Kluwer publishing, is one of the largest STM book and periodical publishers in the world. To reduce overall expenditure while maintaining fulltext access to over 1,350 Springer journals, the Library cancelled the print subscriptions and switched them over to electronic versions in 2005. With the addition of over 8,550 ebooks (i.e. 2,700 in 2005, 2,850 in 2006 and 3,006 in 2007), our users now have 24x7 continual, simultaneous and seamless cross-access to most of the Springer publications including journals, monographs, textbooks, handbooks, and all book series.
Particularly worth mentioning is that apart from the traditional emphasis on STM titles, this e-book collection also includes about 600 books in business and economics and 500 in the humanities and social science. Access to the book series that were not subscribed to by the Library such as Lecture Notes in Physics, Springer Tracts in Advanced Robotics and Modern Physics are now available as a result of this package purchase.
Including the 2,200 Springer e-books purchased via NetLibrary earlier, we now have access to close to 11,000 Springer ebooks. Effective 2007, the Library will stop getting the print version of any books and book series from Springer. Electronic versions of nine major reference works - two in Life Sciences, three in Engineering and four in Business and Social Sciences - were purchased from Wiley. This, together with the five life sciences titles already subscribed to, signifies another conscientious effort by the Library to gradually move our major reference resources from print to online. Two unique products highlighted here are ExpressExec and the Encyclopedia of Life Science.
ExpressExec is the first eMRW purchased by the Library specifically for our business users. It divides the most up-to-date resources of current business practice into 12 modules. Each module includes the best practice cases, key ideas, action points, future reading etc to provide users with new ideas and tools to increase their personal and business effectiveness.
The Encyclopedia of Life Science features more than 3,700 specially commissioned and peer-reviewed articles that span the entire spectrum of life sciences. Not only does this encyclopedia present a comprehensive overview of current research and its groundbreaking applications in life sciences, it also examines the implications of such in law, ethics, medicines and public health, history, religion and industry. Users are invited to find out the details of the other seven new eMRWs at http://library.ust.hk/info/databases/.
Information Services: Eureka!
GNED 008 Eureka! Information Skills for Life Long Learning, a general education course taught by HKUST librarians, will be offered again this Spring semester. This course, graded distinction, pass or fail, is targeted to all undergraduates and will provide them with the opportunity to develop the information literacy skills needed at university and for self-directed lifelong learning. It covers the tools and skills needed to access as well as use information wisely and effectively.
23 students took this course last year. Their comments reflect much about this course: "Very useful for information search in other courses, makes us more independent";
"This course teaches us to search databases & searching skills we might never have known ever after graduation", "I'm really glad to select GNED008 during my exchange semester, and obviously I've obtained much important knowledge from the class."
"I really enjoy the GNED008 course since it contains lots of knowledge which i cannot learn from my department of Biochemistry ... The most useful [is] the searching method of sources in Library and the database. ...I am sure it will be useful when I graduate and go to work. Secondly, some of the classes talk about the business things such as how to find some annual report of a company. I think it is very useful when I have an interview of a company. Furthermore, the class of country information is interesting, too. I think what I have learnt is really the same as the name of the course and I will keep learning for my whole life. Really thanks for teaching."
Course Reserve Improvements for Spring!
As the spring semester begins, the Reserve Collection has now combined both course reserve materials and high-use books for ease of location by students.
To ensure our students acquire the course materials for their class assignments we have eliminated the isolated E-Reserve Workstations. All E-Reserve items are now available through the Library Catalog (http://ustlib.ust.hk). Any electronic version of books and articles will be linked from the catalogue for easy retrieval through one-source searching. Any copyrighted materials and faculty personal copies will continue to be provided in print format at the Reserve Counter (1/F). In order to follow copyright requirements, the library will be unable to scan articles for which we do not have copyright permission.
The high-use books in constant demand have been relocated to the Reserve Counter to ensure access for users. In order to provide extended reading of these high-use items, the borrowing time has been extended to 7 days.
For faculty, if you need any special help with course reserve lists for the semester see the submission information at: http://library.ust.hk/info/rsrv.html.
Please contact the Reserve Counter for questions and feedback at 2358-6776 or [email protected].
Systems Updates: Security in the Catalog and a Wireless
expansion
Library Catalog Security
After making some programmatic adjustments, Library Systems staff have been able to activate secure socket layer (SSL) encryption for the "My Record" of the Library Catalog.
Now when you choose to "Login to My Record" in the Catalog, your browsers' connection will be encrypted to improve the security and privacy of the display of your record details - including your item requests, reading history, circulation status, and other information.
Wireless Network Expansion
During the Fall Semester, ITSC contracted for a major expansion of the MobileNet wireless network coverage and capacity in the Library. About a dozen new wireless network access points were added to the building, bringing the total to 28, each with a capacity of 15-20 simultaneous connections and using the 802.11g communications standard.
The most noticeable change this brings is that every public area of the Library is now fully covered by the wireless network - including all group and faculty study rooms. If you find any public area in the Library which does not have coverage, please report it to us at [email protected].
Media: Scholarly Societies' & Industrial Associations' videos
When you think of "filmmaker" or "video producer", it usually conjures up an image of a Hollywood mogul, or directors like John Woo (吳宇森). But many useful and interesting videos are released each year by scholarly societies and industrial association. Quite a few of them are available in Media Resources.
SME Videos
The Society of Manufacturing Engineers makes new videos every year that are of interest to people in many disciplines. Alternative energy 101: an introduction to manufacturing fuel cells & advanced batteries (Media Resources TJ163.2 .A47 2004) - a "video primer" on alternative energy technologies and fuel cells - could be of interest to mechanical engineers, electrical and electronic engineers, and anyone interested in alternative energy in this era of global warming and
increasing fuel prices.
Engineers and business students alike may also benefit from watching the SME videos A lean supply chain @ John Deere (Media Resources HD38.5 .L43 2002) and Lean accounting (Media Resources HF5635 .L43 2005).
highlights applications of molecular nanotechnology, focusing on CAD simulation tools for the design and analysis of productive nanosystems, the use of carbon nanotubes in commercially viable products, and improved performance and design of aerospace applications, including NASA's mission to Mars.
SIGGRAPH Video Review
Since 1979, SIGGRAPH, also known as the Special Interest Group on Graphics and Interactive Techniques of the ACM (Association for Computing Machinery) has illustrated the latest concepts and achievements in computer graphics and animation through their SIGGRAPH Video Review.
HKUST has collected these videos from 1986. Many of them are in the form of short cartoons. Whether you are a budding computer graphic designer yourself, or you just enjoy seeing what animates cartoons, video games, computer games, and other forms of entertainment, you will find something interesting and amusing in the SIGGRAPH Video Review (Media Resources T385 .S54 no. 24-)
An Update on the Open Access Movement
The open access movement is the worldwide effort to provide free online access to scholarly literature, especially peer-reviewed journal articles and their preprints. There were significant open access (OA) developments in 2006. More OA journals and new digital repositories have been created in different countries to serve as vehicles for providing public access to scholarly output.
At the same time, a number of new OA initiatives have focused on taxpayer-funded research. The number of OA policies adopted by public funding agencies worldwide has largely increased, as the argument for public access to publicly-funded research is a logical and strong one.
Five Research Councils UK (RCUK), for instance, adopted clear OA mandates in 2006. They include the Biotechnology & Biological Sciences Research Council, the Economic & Social Research Council, the Medical Research Council, the Natural Environment Research Council and the Particle Physics and Astronomy Research Council. Wellcome Trust (WT)
implemented its OA policy in 2005 for all new Wellcome research grants.
In 2006, the WT extended this policy from new grants to all outstanding grants, no matter how long ago they were awarded. This will help advance the open access movement considerably, as WT is the UK's largest non-governmental source of funds for biomedical research.
In 2006, we also saw quasi mandates from Germany's DFG (Deutsche Forschungs-gemeinschaft), Austria's FWF (Fund for the Promotion of Scientific Research), and two agencies in Australia, the Australian Research Council and the National Health and Medical Research Council.
China's Ministry of Science and Technology mandated open access to about 80% of the scientific data generated by publicly-funded research. In addition, there were OA requests from the Canadian Breast Cancer Research Alliance, France's CNRS and Infremer and the US National Endowment for the Humanities.
In the US Senate, the Federal Research Public Access Act of 2006 was introduced by Senator John Cornyn (R-TX) and Senator Joseph Lieberman (D-CT). The Act will come up for a vote in 2007 and, if passed, would require federal agencies that fund over $100 million in annual external research to make manuscripts of peer-reviewed journal articles stemming from that research publicly available via the Internet.
At the same time, there was significant growth in the number of digital repositories and the number of articles on deposit. In December 2006, OAIster (http://oaister.umdl.umich.edu/o/oaister/) listed 726 OAI-compliant repositories worldwide, a 25% increase over the previous year. Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, Elsevier, and Thomson also stepped up their efforts to index the network of OA repositories. The development of OA journals matched the growth of OA
repositories. In December 2005, Directory of Open Access Journals listed 1,988 peer-reviewed open-access journals and it listed 2,510 journals in December 2006, an increase of 26%.
Information Commons: A very well-received service facility
Soon after its launch in September 2006, the Information Commons (IC) gained encouraging popularity among Library users. In October and November, there were over 19,000 logins per month at the 51 IC workstations; during busy hours (around 11 am to 6 pm) the main IC area on G/F was often 85% to over 90% full.
The networked printer also proved to be a welcomed facility. The number of print jobs processed rose from 512 in September to 2,369 in October, and then to 3,172 in November.
As the usage in the first three months of service revealed, the IC started to get busy as early as 10 am. In order to improve service support, the service hours of the IC Help Desk were adjusted to start at 10 am instead of 11 am.
Staff at the IC Help Desk are a team with strong computer training. They can answer questions on selection and use of software at IC workstations, as well as troubleshooting of hardware and printing issues.
Besides the hectic area on G/F, the Information Commons also includes two Seminar and Presentation Rooms on LG1 and LG3, which are available for large group discussions and for presentation practice. The computers in these two rooms have identical set-up as other IC workstations, along with wireless mice and keyboards and a large-screen projection system. The equipment set for these rooms may be borrowed from the Information Counter on G/F.
last modified 02 February 2007 © HKUST Library
