Engineering Info @ Imperial College London Library

Over the summer, you may want to pay a visit to the V&A. They are marking the centenary of the founding of the Institution of Structural Engineers (IStructE) with an exhibition to celebrate the importance of engineering in creating some of the most iconic buildings of the past 100 years. Unseen Hands: 100 years of Structural Engineering is on until 1 September 2008.

From the exhibition website:

Using three themes (towers, bridges and large enclosures) the exhibition brings to life the design and construction of structures including New York’s Empire State Building, Switzerland’s Salginatobel Bridge and Poland’s People’s Hall - as well as more modern projects including the Millau Viaduct, the Eden Project and the still-rising Burj Dubai.

Through a variety of media - models, drawings, CAD imagery, video and photographs sourced from all over the world - the ambition and ingenuity of these structures is revealed. Developments in material, form and technique are also explored

From next Monday, Level 2 in the Central Library will be closed to all library users because it is to be redecorated. Work includes both the repainting of all walls and a complete recarpeting. It is anticipated that the refit will take 3 to 4 weeks.

While this redecoration project takes place a regular fetching service will be offered to allow access to stock. The service will run from the Issue Desk from Monday to Friday on the hour between 10:00 and 17:00. You will need to complete a form at the Issue Desk.

Graduate Junction is a website designed to help early career researchers make contact with others with similar research interests regardless of which department, instiution or country they work in. Set up by two graduate researchers at Durham University, it has proved very popular with researchers and academics alike. Since the launch in May 2008 over 2000 researchers have registered in the UK and researchers from more than 40 countries have joined.

Once registered you can search for fellow researchers by keyword, institution, department, supervisor or name. Alternatively, you can search The Graduate Junction’s on-line researchgroups, allowing you to find and communicate with a number of other researchers sharing your research interest.

So far, the Imperial researchers who have registered are from the Electronic Engineering department so if you’re based at Imperial in either the Civil Engineering or Earth Sciences and Engineering departments have a think about registering.

The library has recently subscribed to two new e-journals which may be of interest. They are accessible via the library catalogue. 

Earth Science Informatics
This international, English-language journal publishes original, interdisciplinary articles on all aspects of informatics dealing with the Earth system. Earth Science Informatics, as a scientific discipline, focuses on two major aspects: (i) the formal representation of the spatial and temporal relationships between entities in the Earth system and (ii) the design, development, and application of computational tools to acquire, analyze, manage and communicate information about the spatio-temporal dynamics of the Earth system.

Engineering and technology
The IET’s magazine covering science, engineering and technology

Vincent Chu, a civil engineer based in Hong Kong, has published a freely accessible e-book titled 200 Questions and Answers on Practical Civil Engineering Works. It contains many useful questions that civil engineers may come across during their day-to-day work 

A free copy of the book can be downloaded from the Institute of Civil Engineers website.

Here is a list of new books added to the Earth Sciences & Engineering collection in the Central Library in June. 

Please email me at lawrence.jones@imperial.ac.uk if you have any book suggestions.

Just a reminder that the Central Library will be closed from the 28th June to the 6th July to allow the completion of the building work and will re-open with the new ground floor on Monday the 7th July.

Central Library opening hours

If you are registered to use the Digimap Ordnance Survey resource at Imperial College, you would have recently received an email from EDINA explaining that you need to check your registration details and to choose (and provide an answer to) a security question. You have been asked to do this because Digimap will be switching off their Athens access after 31 July 2008.  

From 1 Aug 2008 you will need to login to Digimap via the UK Federation. You won’t notice any great change in accessing the Digimap resource from 1 Aug since accessing Digimap via the UK Federation is very similar to accessing it via Athens. 

But if you have any data saved under your Digimap account (e.g. Carto Bookmarks, MasterMap Downloads) you will need to transfer it over from your Athens account to your UK Federation account before 1 Aug 2008. If you fail to do this, all of your saved data will be lost. 

To transfer over any saved data, this is what you do: 

1. Login to Digimap via the Athens route: see http://edina.ac.uk/digimap/

2. Once you have logged in, you will be prompted to set up a security question (there are a choice of 4 questions such as ‘What was the name of your first school?’)

3. Logout of Digimap as well as Athens.

3. Re-login to Digimap using the ’UK Federation’ route: see http://edina.ac.uk/digimap/

4. Answer the security question you set up earlier via Athens.

5. You should then get a message to say that your saved data has been transferred across.

If you have any queries or problems, please let me know and I will do my best to answer them. The following Digimap guidance sheet site is quite useful:
http://edina.ac.uk/supportstaff/access_notes.html

A new report urges caution against the over-reliance on citation statistics such as the impact factors. The report, entitled Citation Statistics, on the use of citations in assessing research quality (PDF document), was commissioned by the International Mathematical Union (IMU). The work based on practices as reported from mathematicians and other scientists from around the world.

The report highlights several common misuses of citation statistics in evaluating research. It cautions that citations provide only a limited and incomplete view of research quality. Research is too important, they say, to measure its value with only a single, coarse tool.

The report argues that the meaning of citations is not well-understood. This means that a citation’s meaning can be very far from ‘impact’, making the objectivity of citations illusory. In addition, while having a single number to judge quality is indeed simple, it can lead to a shallow understanding of something as complicated as research. Numbers are not inherently superior to sound judgements, observes the report.

Here is a list of new books added to the Civil Engineering Dept Library collection this month. Please email me at lawrence.jones@imperial.ac.uk if you have any book suggestions.