Ch...ch...ch..changes

It appears that the world keeps moving, and even the cutting edge information in my Blog becomes obsolete. I have edited the posts for Proxy (now gone) and CDIGIX (also now gone) to reflect the transition to various new services.

The Proxy is being retired June 15th, and has been replaced with a more secure connection known as WebVPN. There are many advantages to the occasional user. However WebVPN does not work with the O'Reilly Tech Books.

Because many of you are technologically saavy, it will likely not be difficult for you to transition instead to the Client VPN. The client VPN works perfectly well with the O'Reilly books as well as many other things that we can talk about at another time.

For more information click on the "Connect from home" link in the upper right hand corner of the UCR Libraries Web Site

CDIGIX has been replaced by a new service called Ruckus. I will reserve judgement. For more information visit the UCR Legal2Share page.

Bookmarklets

I have fallen in love with bookmarklets. I have in fact become obsessed with bookmarklets. These handy javascripts, masquerading as bookmarks can allow you one to do an amazing array of things, including efficiently searching the world of literature. I have created (or tweaked) the following bookmarklets:


Internet Explorer: (Right click on the link below, "add to favorites", put them in the links folder)



ISBN lookup for Melvyl (on a page with an isbn, this will automatically search for the ISBN in Melvyl)

ISBN Lookup for Scotty (ditto for Scotty)

Scotty Keyword Lookup (highlight a word on the page and click on this link, or just click on this link to do a quick Scotty search)

Amazon.com ISBN Look-up (look up an ISBN in Amazon.com)

Amazon.com Keyword Look-up (highlight a word and click on this link to look it up in Amazon.com)

Wikipedia Lookup (highlight a word and click on this link to look it up in Wikipedia)

Google Scholar





Firefox (and Netscape and Mozilla) - Drag the links onto your toolbar



ISBN lookup for Melvyl (on a page with an isbn, this will automatically search for the ISBN in Melvyl)

ISBN Lookup for Scotty (ditto for Scotty)

Scotty Keyword Lookup (click on this link to do a quick Scotty search)

Books Seeking Readers

Dear Readers,

Every once in a while (actually annually), I like to go through a list of the books that I have bought in the past year and see how much usage the books are getting. It is a fun analytical exercise and helps me choose what to buy in the future. Sometimes I run into unused books and think, "why on earth has no one yet checked out this book?" So I decided to feature a few (in CS this time), and give them a chance to make a pitch for themselves.

Book seeking reader

Reader wanted for book on cryptography and information theory. I am very readable and would probably be most interesting to people without a strong background in either topic. I would especially like to be read by an undergraduate who is interested in seeing connections between computers and everyday life. My name is Decoding the Universe: How the New Science of Information is Explaining Everything in the Cosmos, from our Brains to Black Holes.

Bachelor (or bachelorette) number two is a somewhat drier sounding book named Researching Information Systems and Computing. This book is perfect for a beginning masters or PhD student in CS who would like to get a broad picture of the types of research (methodology not subject) done in CS.

Our third contestant is a very interesting collection of essays which is available either as a printed book or an e-book. The Handbook of Bioinspired Algorithms and Applications is probably most interesting to advanced researchers in neural networks and automata. The book has several articles on what we can learn about processes from bees and ants. This book is thoughtful and insightful, but has no real sense of humor.


I would also like to call your attention to:Guide to RISC Processors: For Programmers and Engineers (readable and educational)

I have no doubt that these books will eventually develop a rich social life, but I thought I would try to help them out a little. All of the books can be found in our Scotty catalog.

As usual, I welcome your comments.

Nature Nanotechnology and Photonics

The UCs now have access to the new Nature journals, which you're now free use and abuse. You should see the records appear in Scotty shortly.


http://www.nature.com/nnano/index.html
http://www.nature.com/nphoton/index.html

Full Backfile from O'Reilly!

I have some great news for you all. We now have ALL of the O'Reilly books. nearly 900 of them. You will no longer have to check if the publication date is 2003- or 2004- or whatever...we have them ALL!

http://library.ucr.edu/go/oreilly

Or find the link on the library Web site.

There is a huge backlog of ebooks that have not made it into Scotty yet, so the books may not show up there for a while.

Happy reading!

Chat Reference

This weekend, we officially launched chat (Internet) reference for UC people. You may not get me, you may not even get a UCR Librarian, but during the following hours, the ask a librarian icon on the Libraries' Web site will become LIVE and you can chat with a real live UC Librarian. Try it out.

Hours:

Sunday		Monday - Thursday		Friday
5 - 9 p.m.		11 a.m. - 9 p.m.		11 a.m. - 5 p.m.

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.

Fab New Library Services in Fall!

We will be offering some wonderful new services in the Fall Quarter and I think you guys might be the first to find out about them.

• Laptop Check- out - We will have 10 laptops for use in the Rivera and Science Libraries
• Bookable Study rooms - Reserve a room for studying or for meeting with your students
• Office Suite on all Libraries' computers

Stay tuned for more fabulousness.

Free music for you!

In addition to being a librarian, I am also a graduate student in Education and I stumbled upon the most wonderful thing this week. It may not be quite library related, but I couldn't pass up this oportunity to make sure you all know about it.

[Section deleted due to the inexorable march of time and change - The CDIGIX service has been discontinued and the new service is known as Ruckus]

For more info go to http://www.cnc.ucr.edu/legal2share/index.php?content=start

RSS

Okay, so many of you techie types are already aware of RSS and may already be set up to receive alerts on a variety of topics, but I do want to point out some RSS 411 that may be new to you.

For those of you who have no idea what I am talking about when I say RSS, it is basically a technology that allows makers of "news" to package the news in such a way that a browser, website, email reader or other independent application on your side can go pick it up and show it to you. You can monitor many of these news "feeds" from the same program at the same time, so these programs are often call aggregators, because they aggregate all of your important news in one place for you.

Most all traditional news sources (Is Yahoo! news traditional?) now produce feeds. Feeds are also available for weather, craigslist, blogger (most any blog really) etc..., and now a growing array of library-type resources. Not only does the library have an RSS feed of library news (and my humble little blogs as well) but now O'Reilly, Web of Science, Compendex, Factiva, the Springer Book Series, and probably more, offer RSS feeds of their latest content.

Look for the lovely little orange rectangles or the more recent orange square.

Feeds can be picked up by Mozilla Thunderbird, put into your myYahoo!, placed onto your Firefox links toolbar as an "active link," converted to HTML and fed to any Web page (Including iLearn), or read in a dizzying array of ather ways.



For more information and a somewhat realtime list of our resources that support RSS, visit the RSS page on the Libraries' Web site.

Oh and do remember to copy this URL into your aggregator:

http://englibucr.blogspot.com/atom.xml

Remote Access Services

The Campus' Remote Access Services allow you to get to the Libraries' resources from the comfort and convenience of your home or any other location with an internet connection. I would urge all of you to get this working. Sometimes it can be a little bit of an investment, but it is worth it.

Too get more information, click on the "Connect from home" link in the upper left hand of the Libraries' Home page

[Section deleted due to the inexorable march of time and progress]

Username = UCR NetID (same as email)
Password = NetID PAssword (same as email)

Note: If you use EndNote to connect to databases, or if you use SciFinder Scholar, you will need to download the Client VPN.

If you have any difficulties, please feel free to contact me.

ENGnetBASE - eBooks

Another set of eBooks that we have acquired for you engineering types is the ENGnetBASE. This collection includes a large number (511 at last count) of CRC eBooks on a variety of engineering topics. These books can be found by searching Scotty, or directly at http://www.engnetbase.com.

There are also several sub-collections for specific engineering areas:

Electrical Engineering
Environmental Engineering
Mechanical Engineering
Information Security
Info Technology
Materials
Nanotechnology
Telecommunications

Remember to use the Proxy or VPN to read these at home. Enjoy!

IEEE and ACM

I want to take this opportunity to remind you all that we have the complete online library of journals and proceedings from IEEE and ACM. These two collections represent the majority of the literature produced in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. If you are using Inspec or Compendex and the UC-eLinks button indicates that there is a journal or proceeding that we don't have from IEEE or ACM, it is simply wrong. The following links will take you directly to a searcheable, browseable interface for accessing these publications.

• ACM = http://library.ucr.edu/go/acm
• IEEE = http://library.ucr.edu/go/ieee
  

New Books Lists

One great way to find out what is new in the Libraries is to get on the email list of new books in your area. The lists are separated by broad catagories based on Library of Congress call numbers, (e.g. T= Engineering QA=Math and Computer Science).

To sign up: Visit the new books page for your subject and scroll to the bottom. Enter your email address in the box and click on the button "email me __'s."

The Latest T's for 7/25/06

• Biological and pharmaceutical nanomaterials
• Integrated governance and water basin management : conditions for regime change and sustainability
• Introduction to microfluidics
• Mechanical tribology : materials, characterization, and applications
• Vehicular engine design
• Enduring passion : the story of the Mercedes-Benz brand / Leslie Butterfield.

The Latest QA's for 7/25/06

• Mathematical methods for scientists and engineers
• Beginning RSS and Atom programming
• Building the data warehouse

Powersearching Google

On Thursday, I will be teaching a class on getting the most out of Google. It is unfortunatly full, or I would invite each and every one of you. However, I have made the slides available on the Libraries' Web site.

One of the topics I am covering in the workshop is Google Books, and the method for linking directly to Scotty from Google Books when using the Firefox browser. It is quite cool.

Panorama in Process

I am working on a panorama tour to go with the existing Virtual Tour of the Science Library. I haven't quite managed to get the stitching and lighting just right, but it will improve more as I learn more.

O'Reilly Books

I am not sure if any of you out there in Engineeringland are unaware of our extreme fortune, but I want you all to know that we have the great good luck to have a subscription to all of the O'Reilly Technical Books written in the last few years - online. If you are on campus, simply go to http://library.ucr.edu/go/oreilly. If you are off campus, you will want to use the proxy. There are more than 300 books available from Ajax to Zope.

Using Compendex

Check out this demo for learning how to use Compendex at the UCR libraries!