USF Lakeland Library Services

The USF Libraries have acquired three Referex ebook collections from Elsevier, in support of engineering, chemistry, environmental sciences, and related fields.

Referex bundles a wide-ranging selection of handbooks and practical guides published by Butterworth-Heinemann, Elsevier, and Academic Press in support of engineering and the sciences. It can be searched across all titles by full-text or key word. Within each collection, users can narrow their search, and view books by chapter and section. Chapters and sections can be read online or, downloaded as a PDF and printed. USF acquired three Referex collections with close to 400 titles.

All titles can be searched in conjunction with USF’s subscriptions to the Inspec and Compendex databases on the Engineering Village 2 platform. The books (and the full-text) are also accessible through the catalog.

Referex: Mechanical Engineering and Materials, a collection of handbooks, professional resources, and practical guides covering automotive, aeronautical, and marine engineering, metallurgy, tribology, maintenance, quality systems, health and safety. Includes such titles as Plant Engineer’s Reference Book, D. Snow; Nanomaterials: Design and Simulation, P. Balbuena; Handbook of Advanced Ceramics: Materials, Applications, Processing and Properties, S. Somiya; Additives for Plastics Handbook, J Murphy; Handbook of Offshore Engineering, S. Chakrabarti; Handbook of Pumps and Pumping, B. Nesbitt; Handbook of Valves and Actuators, B. Nesbitt; and Reinforced Plastics Handbook, D. Rosato.

Referex: Electronics and Electrical is comprised of a comprehensive range of books for electrical power engineers, electronics engineers and circuit designers, embedded systems and computer engineers, and communications engineers. The breadth of this collection is reflected in its key titles which include Power Electronics Handbook, Electrical Engineer’s Reference Book, Handbook of Image and Video Processing, and Handbook of Medical Imaging, Texas instruments Op Amps for Everyone, Marty Brown’s Power Supply Cookbook, and Video Demystified by Jack.

Referex: Chemical, Petrochemical and Process provides the leading titles in energy, chemical engineering, chemical hazards, process engineering, oil and gas engineering, and environmental engineering. Key titles include the definitive Bretherick’s Handbook of Reactive Chemical Hazards, and the unique handbooks from Gulf Professional Publishing, such as Standard Handbook of Petroleum and Natural Gas Engineering and Rules of Thumb for Chemical Engineers.

For these ebooks and other library resources visit http://www.lakeland.usf.edu/library. Click on “Search the catalog” or “Search the databases” to begin.

On Thursday, February 21st, users of the IEEE Xplore can expect up to one hour of downtime, beginning at 8:00AM EST. Xplore is the search engine for the IEEE Electronic Library (IEL).

The USF Libraries have acquired the multidisciplinary database SourceOECD.

SourceOECD is an online library of statistical databases, books, and periodicals from OECD, the Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development. The OECD, a membership of 30 countries, is one of the world’s largest publishers in the fields of economics and public policy. SourceOECD is comprised of over 1,800 online books with unrestricted access grouped in 24 themes, 24 periodicals, 3 reference titles, and 26 OECD statistical databases, all in full text. Themed groupings include: Education, Energy, Emerging Economies, Environment & Sustainable Development, Finance and Investment, Science, Social Issues, Urban and Regional Development, Transportation and more. Twenty-six statistical databases from the OECD are presented enabling users to download data and build their own tables, in real time. Users can also build cross-database tables. OECD has recently launched OECD.Stat that allows searches across the various OECD databases. It is now in a beta test until September 2008. The USF Libraries hold a subscription to all OECD online publications with the exception of the third-party IEA Statistics.

To access it, search MetaLib by using the “Search the Databases” link on the library’s main page.

The data from the 2006 Journal Citation Reports is now available in the ISI Web of Knowledge database. This data gives information on how many times a journal was cited, how many it has cited other journals and it’s impact factor, among others.

This kind of information is interesting when you are choosing a journal to submit an article, or when you are collecting additional information for a tenure and/or promotion dossier.

You can access the Journal Citation Reports in the Web of Knowledge database. Go to MetaLib, search the database by name and click on the resulting link. In the database itself, at the very top, you will see a drop-down menu. You will see the option for the Reports. If you are from off campus, don’t forget to log into the network first.

I found the following webpage that lists the differences between the PubMed and MEDLINE databases:
http://www.nlm.nih.gov/pubs/factsheets/dif_med_pub.html .

MEDLINE is a component of PubMed and both deal with the life sciences. PubMed is free and while it may be easier to use, MEDLINE will be more specialized and will link to more full-text. Both databases are still very useful to know. The USF Libraries gives you access to MEDLINE via different platforms; the OVID platform contains a subject headings map (a list of predetermined descriptors) - the MeSH - to help you formulate your queries. It is also available in PubMed. A common strategy is to use PubMed to draft a search query you will then use in MEDLINE.

The data from the 2005 Journal Citation Reports is now available in the ISI Web of Knowledge database. This data gives information on how many times a journal was cited, how many it has cited other journals and it’s impact factor, among others.

This kind of information is interesting when you are choosing a journal to submit an article, or when you are collecting additional information for a tenure and/or promotion dossier.

The ACM Digital Library, specializing in computer science, will be down for maintenance today starting at 4:00 PM. The service should be restablished within 12 hours.

To be notified when the service will be back up, enter your email address on the ACM website.

On Wednesday, April 5th from 10-11 am, there will be a class on Compendex in room LAC1170B. This class will showcase our new interface for the Compendex database, Engineering Village 2. Students, staff and faculty are all invited to attend.

We have now access to Compendex through a new interface, Engineering Village 2. Compendex is the online version of the Engineering Index, the most important index covering scientific literature in all fields of engineering.

Engineering Village 2 offers three modes of searching, a thesaurus, limits by document and treatment types, results refining, email *and* RSS alerts, direct export of citations to Refworks and even a cool little application that permits easy blogging of search results. Coverage is from 1884 to current; updated weekly. This database doesn’t contain full-text but a link to the full-text is provide when available.

Look for Compendex in MetaLib!

Chemical Abstracts Services have announced the discontinuance of the version of SciFinder Scholar 2004 version on March 31, 2006. The new version, SciFinder Scholar 2006, has to be downloaded from the CAS website in order for you to access the database. For more information, see http://www.lib.usf.edu/ref/databases/scifinder.html.