A memo on NCTU Digital Library, ydlin in October 1999
Folks, Today I invited a professional of NCTU library to give a talk
to my seminar course for senior undergraduates. I've carefully recorded
and organized the info I heard regarding NCTU digital library. I am afraid
that some of you still don't know how to utilize digital library (and
you know who you are), so I think I should email you this. As a graduate
student, you should know all info I now summarize here. And most importantly,
look them up when needed. When I was a graduate student, I can only
rely on INSPEC, one of the databases described below. Now you got a lot
at your finger tips here at NCTU.
There are many info available over the Internet. You can find the
unofficial data through "search engines", while you have to resort to
the library databases for officially published data including journals,
conference proceedings, technical reports, real-time valued added data,
books, etc. You can call the unofficial data found by search engines
as ³¥¥v and the officially published data
as ¥¿¥v. When you search data, you should watch both.
NCTU digital library "http://digilib.nctu.edu.tw" has subscribed over 90
databases with a total yearly subscription fee of over 9,000,000 NT.
Among these databases, some are very related to our works. IEL is a must
read and it provides full-text of IEEE and IEE journals, standards, and
conference proceedings. In addition to IEL, Elsevier, IDEAL, EBSCO, OCLC
are the very few that provide full-text content on-line. Other databases
only provide abstracts. CSA (Computer Science A...), INSPEC
(which I used most often while I was a graduate student), EI (Engineering
Index), SCI (Science Citation Index), along with IEL, are databases you
would like to visit often. In particular, SCI, with a yearly subscription
fee of over 1,500,000 NT has "references cite",
"cited", "related articles" for each paper, which helps
you to trace all related works and know who are citing your papers.
JCR (Journal Citation Report) database even can tell you the "impact
factor" of various journals.
Since only a few databases, CSA, EI, and SCI, have mirror sites at NCTU,
most other databases have long delay for overseas access. For ACM, NCTU
digital library does not subscribe its database. Only hardcopies are
available. (Maybe the reason is that ACM does not offer it for schools,
although ACM also has digital library available for individual subscribers.
Our lab has that.)
In summary, IEL (the most important full-paper source for IEEE and IEE),
SCI, EI, CSA, INSPEC, JCR are the databases you should lookup for official
publications. NCTU digital library also has a subscription to a patent
database. Check them out now!