Engineers : do take advantage of access provided by UQ Library to the premier information resources for civil engineers. Two of the best are the ASCE (American Society of Civil Engineers) and ICE (Institution of Civil Engineers) as demonstrated by their inclusion in the top twenty engineering websites recently listed by Global Site Plans.

The ASCE Library helps to find articles of interest across all disciplines of civil engineering providing full-text papers from published ASCE Journals and Proceedings while the ICE Virtual Library is an online civil engineering resource. It hosts the full archive of the Institution of Civil Engineers back to 1836, including journals and books.

As a result of our recent professional development activity - Cyberschool Update, 2013 - it was suggested that a discussion forum be formed for participants to share information and ask questions with regards to databases and eBooks.

As a discussion starter, what session did you find most informative and why?

Click on this link which takes you to our Professional Development page to see presentations from most speakers.

Please note: non-UQ staff and students are not able to comment at the moment. If you email your comments to cyberschool@library.eq.edu.au, we would be happy to upload them to the Blog for you.

The Library has recently subscribed to LexisNexis Practical Guidance, a research tool that offers modules in a range of practice areas. Use this resource to discover practice-related checklists, legislation, case law and commentary. As the name suggests, this resource also offers practioner guidance throughout.

To explore LexisNexis Practical Guidance, click on the relevant practice area appearing on the top of the screen, and then browse to the relevant topic or use the search bar appearing on the right-hand side of the screen.

Knovel provides access to essential reference works and databases from leading publishers and professional societies covering the fields of engineering, chemistry and the life sciences. The collection is continually expanding.

Knovel's new interactive graphs allow you to plot curves from an equation, digitize charts, and plot and compare several curves from individual points. All five Knovel Graphs, (1) Equation Plotter, (2) Graph Digitizer, (3) Graph Plotter, (4) Phase Diagram Viewer and (5) Parameterized Graph have been reprogrammed with scalable resolution so the graphs can be resized. There is a quick How-to-Use guide available on the interface.

The Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET) has announced that Inspec, its database indexing science and engineering research, has reached 13 million records. Inspec adds approximately 700,000 new records each year, indexing scientific literature in electrical engineering, electronics, physics and information technology from 1896.

Inspec on the Engineering Village platform enables researchers to drill down search results using Inspec controlled terms, Uncontrolled terms and Inspec classification codes. The Inspec Thesaurus identifies controlled vocabulary terms and finds synonyms and related terms.