Stanford Engineering Library Blog

Welcome to the Stanford Engineering Library weblog. The Library ran a survey to gather feedback from faculty, staff, and students.

Over 300 people completed the online survey and over 100 people filled out the paper survey. Prize winners will be announced soon.

If you missed the survey, you can still send us informal feedback.

Thank you to all who completed the Engineering Library survey. Over 400 surveys were completed. The winners for the prize drawings are Keiichi McGuire, Chong Xie, Barden Shimbo, Christina Liebner, and Raymond Alimurung. Congratulations!

Ever wondered if Stanford subscribes to a spefic journal? Below are some tips on locating print and electronic journals available through the Stanford Libraries.

Locating Print Copies
For print copies, search Socrates. Socrates mainly includes holdings for Green, Biology, Chemistry, Earth Sciences & Map Collection, Education, Engineering, Marine Biology, Math, Music, and Physics.

Some Stanford libraries (such as Lane Medical, the Business library, and SLAC for instance) maintain their own library catalogs. Information they put into Socrates may not be as current as what is in their catalog, so best to search their catalogs as well. Go to a list of all the Stanford libraries.

Locating Information about Online Journals
Information about the online copy may be found in Socrates, SFX or TDNet. Sometimes it is in all three location. If information is wrong or there is some type of problem with the subscription, it may not appear in all places. For more on SFX, see Access E-Journals with SFX Linking.

We may get title via aggregator full-text database like Academic Search Premier. This mean we pays for access to a collection of titles, kind of like leasing them instead of buying individual electronic journal titles. Currently E-only titles are in TDNet but not in Socrates, although these will be loaded into Socrates sometime this summer.

Academic Search Premier contents have may titles with embargoed content. TDNet enters holdings as closed range of dates whereas SFX gives start date plus a dash and then qualifies by saying last 12 months not available.

Multiple Ways of Accessing Content
Not uncommon to have more than one way to access the same content for a title. For example, the medical library may have bought a back file, current access via aggregator. It's not uncommon to have access via multiple aggregators as well as publisher.

As you can see, sometimes it can be tricky to locate information about journals. Please feel free to contact your librarian for assistance.

SFX is a resource-linking technology that provides access to full-text of articles (if available), local holdings, or the option to download the citation to RefWorks or Endnote.

When searching citation databases, like Inspec or Web of Science, you will see a Find it at Stanford buttonClicking on this button will give you a list of full-text sources that are available. If no full-text resources are available, you can easily search Socrates or the UC catalog from the SFX menu.

SFX links are also now available in Socrates. If you search by a journal title, click on the Details or the @SU button to see the full-text options. Here’s an example:

1. Search Socrates by a journal, such as Journal of Engineering Materials and Technology
2. Click the @ SU or Details button to see the full-text options. In this case, the full-text is available from the Institute of Physics Journal. Clicking on Details will take you to the complete item description while clicking on @SU will just pop up the SFX menu.

3. After clicking on Details, you should see an SFX menu. Click the Go button. Note: sometimes you will end up at the journal page and have to navigate to the full-text of the article.

The Engineering Library has an RSS feed that displays new books. Check it out.

Use scitopia.org to search over 3 million documents, including peer-reviewed journal content and technical conference papers, spanning 150 years of science and technology. Scitopia is a federated search portal created through the collaboration of 15 societies, including AIAA, AIP, ASME, AVS, ECS, IEEE, OSA, SAE, SIAM, SPIE, and more.

Stanford users will be able to access full-text content covered in scitopia when the library has a current subscriptions. For example, Stanford users could then access articles in IEEExplore library and the SPIE digital library as Stanford libraries pays for access to these databases.

The Engineering Library is pleased to announce that the AIAA papers are now available online back to 1963.

Stanford users continue to have access to the journal back-file as well.

Junior, Stanford's robot Volkswagen, passed a basic driver's test Thursday. A team of officials from the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA) visited a parking lot next to Google to test the car to see if it would qualify for the upcoming Urban Challenge, DARPA's third competition for driverless vehicles.

Driving at 15 mph, Junior passed with flying colors, including a 3-point U-turn and successful navigation of a four-way stop with human-driven cars.

The team working on this project consists mostly of graduate students, research staff and faculty; the squad works in the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab (SAIL).

From a recent CNET article:

Stanford Racing Team is notable because it won the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge, a $2 million robot race across 132 miles of Nevada desert. At the time, Stanford was a new entrant to the DARPA Grand Challenges--which first began in 2004--and kept a lower profile than teams organized by institutions such as Carnegie Mellon University, a pioneer in robotics that entered two cars in the race. But Stanford's robot, Stanley, finished the course in the fastest time--under 10 hours--making it the first to accomplish DARPA's mission for autonomous cars and set a new standard in artificial intelligence.

Now the Stanford team has drawn widespread attention and sponsors such as Google, Red Bull and Intel. A Google representative at the test site said that Google co-founder Larry Page called him up last year and said that "he wanted to sponsor the best teams."

Call Number: Engineering Library Q225.5 .M34 2007

This book outlines the consequences of digitization for peer-reviewed research articles published in electronic journals. It has often been argued that digitization will revolutionize scientific communication. However, this study concludes that this is not the case. Authors make little or no use of the possibilities offered by the digital medium, new procedures for electronic peer review have not replaced traditional peer review, and users do not seem to accept new forms of interaction offered by some electronic journals. The main innovations are to be found at the level of the infrastructures developed by publishers. Scientists themselves appear to be reluctant to change their established patterns of behaviour in formal scientific communication.

The book provides a theoretical background to the history and structure of scientific communication, as well as an in-depth study of electronic journals over the period 1987-2004. It offers a unique approach that questions more conventional ideas about the ‘revolutionary’ impact of digitization on scientific communication and the innovative role of publishers and academia.

Written for:
Researchers, graduate/PhD students in (electronic) publishing, scientific communication, e-science; managers and policy makers in academic libraries; managers and policy makers in the publishing industry

IEEE Xplore Digital Library will be unavailable from 3:00pm-4:00pm EDT on 21 June due to scheduled maintenance. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.

The Board of Trustees last week approved the site and concept for a new $12.7 million Mechanical Engineering building on the east side of Lomita Mall.

The three-story building will bring two groups in the Department of Mechanical Engineering—Mechanics and Computation, and Biomechanical Engineering—together in one facility.

The new building will include faculty, staff and student offices, laboratories, conference rooms and collaborative spaces. As part of the project, new courtyards will be designed, and the existing large Chinese elm in the area will be preserved and should be protected during construction.

The project is scheduled to return to the trustees for design approval in October, project approval in February 2008 and construction approval in June 2008. If all goes according to plan, the building will be completed by December 2009.

Full Story in the Stanford Report