Kresge Engineering Library News Number 22, October 2008
Laura Calverley, Editor.

1. Engineering Library Staff
Our newest staff member is Laura Calverley who joined us in August. Laura is the Reference & Outreach Services Librarian, and the selector and liaison to the CEE Department. With this issue, Laura takes over as Newsletter Editor, and she has created its new blog format. Lisa Ngo is the Instruction and Electronic Services Librarian, and selector and liaison to the ME and MSE Departments. I am the Head Librarian, and liaison and selector for BioE, EECS, IEOR, and NE Departments. As selectors, each of us is responsible for purchasing books, journals and other materials to meet the research and teaching needs of College of Engineering faculty and students.

Brice Sullivan is the Circulation Supervisor and manages all the course reserves for Engineering classes. Fannie Yip, Technical Processing Supervisor, and Pati Moran, Technical Processing Assistant, together process all the materials that come into and leave the Engineering Library. Fannie and Brice also work at the reference desk, and Pati works at the Circulation desk. Taking care of all our website development, current serials lists and archiving EECS Technical Reports is our Electronic Resources Specialist, Fleur Helsingor.
–Jean McKenzie

2. Ebooks
Our electronic books collection is growing in leaps and bounds with the latest additions of Ebrary and a UC-wide trial to Springer e-books.

Ebrary is a collection of full-text searchable books with
built-in software tools. It is multidisciplinary and includes titles such as "Java, a Beginner's Guide" by H. Schild, "Organic and Inorganic Nanostructures" by A. Nabok, and "Computational Bioengineering" by M. Cerrolaza. Get started with Ebrary guide

The UC-wide trial to the Springer eBook Collection gives us online access to Springer's extensive digitized collection of scientific, technical, and biomedical ebooks. Springer books are browsable by subject area or full-text searchable. Our trial ends on December 31st, 2008.

Interested in other electronic books? See all our e-books resources online.

3. SciFinder Scholar – On the Web!

SciFinder Scholar is now available to UC Faculty, staff, and students on the web in addition to the client version that many of you are familiar with.

The web version includes features not available in the client version such as "Keep Me Posted", which allows users to set up current awareness searches.

To use the web version, users must first register with a current Berkeley e-mail address. Registration information

4. IM Reference
Participating UCB science libraries are now offering reference services over instant messaging. Chat reference will be available Monday through Friday from 10am-12pm and 1pm-5pm. You can access IM reference through the Meebo chat widget that appears on many of our web pages, including the Engineering Library’s Ask Us page. Additionally, you can add the username “ucbscilibs” to your buddy list on AIM, Google Chat, or Yahoo Messenger.

5. Berkeley Research Impact Initiative (BRII)

The BRII, co-sponsored by UC Berkeley’s Vice-Chancellor for Research and the University Librarian, supports Berkeley researchers who choose to make their journal publications freely available to the public.

BRII covers up to $3,000 of the publication fees charged by open access (OA) publishers (i.e. PLoS, BioMed Central, etc.). BRII also covers up to $1,500 of the “paid access” fees charged by non-OA publishers (i.e. IMechE (PEP), Springer, Taylor & Francis, Wiley), who make articles free to read at the moment of publication.

A list of OA and paid access publishers can be found on the UC Berkeley Scholarly Communication website. For guidelines, questions and application forms, please see the BRII website.