Conference Proceedings

I am going to lay this on the line.

I have no idea what to do about conference proceedings. We have full coverage of ACM conferences and IEEE conferences and ACM/IEEE conferences through our digital library subscriptions, but I get dozens of notification slips for conferences in any given week and I really can't buy them all and I really can't buy just one or two individual years in a whole series, so really I just pretty much say no. For example, this week I have a notification for:

1. Advanced Materials for Energy Conversion (III)
2. World Environmental and Water Resources Congress (2006)
3. Waste Management and the Environment (III)
4. Management of Intentional and Accidental Water Pollution (2005)
5. Advanced Materials Forum (III)

I think you probably get the point.

So the upshot is, if you do see a paper in a volume of proceedings in Compendex or in the references of another paper, unless it is IEEE or ACM, the chances are we don't have it. However, if you request the paper from ILL (email to illsci@ucr.edu with the information about the paper and your name, department, status and email address), you will likely get it emailed to you in a matter of days. This is actually much more convenient than coming to the Science Library and copying it yourself. In the end, I think you will thank me for not buying the proceedings volume in which your paper can be found.

On the other hand, if you know of a great conference, in which all (or most) of the papers are high quality and pertinent to UCR research or teaching, do let me know, because I can put those conferences on a standing order. However you would then have to come here to copy the papers you want.

P.S. A note on SPIE. Once upon a time we had full online access to the proceedings of SPIE. Then it stopped, presumably because we weren't actually paying for them. Please let me know if you are a big fan of SPIE. I might be able to start the process of actually buying them, and I would know for sure if anyone is reading this blog.

P.P.S. I forgot to mention that we also have all of the proceedings done by the S.A.E. (Note: Because of overly restrictive Digital Rights Management policies by S.A.E. we are, hopefully temporarily, without S.A.E. access)

P.P.P.S. I am also working on getting full access to M.R.S. Proceedings, but do feel free to help me advocate.

P.P.P.P.S. Which also brings up the point that if you know of any organizations that publish all of their proceedings online, let me know. I may not know about it, and they may be useful.