American Association of Engineering Education: Engineering Libraries Division
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/07419050410567317 |
| Date | 01 September 2004 |
| Pages | 13-13 |
| Published date | 01 September 2004 |
| Author | Julia Gelfand |
| Subject Matter | Library & information science |
American Association of Engineering Education:
Engineering Libraries Division
Julia Gelfand
LIBRARY HITECH NEWS Number 8 2004, p. 13, #Emerald Group Publishing Limited, 0741-9058, DOI 10.1108/07419050410567317 13
The annual meeting of the American
Association of Engineering Education
(ASEE) took place in Salt Lake City,
Utah, June 20-23, 2004. ASEE has
many divisions to attract its special
constituencies to customized
programming and the Engineering
Libraries Division (ELD) had a full
calendar of events and programs.
Increasingly, engineering librarians
identify with this group as well as
affiliate with either or both national
professional library organizations, the
American Library Association and or
the Special Libraries Organization. This
year, the schedule allowed librarians to
attend multiple conferences if they
chose to cross the country in the matter
of days from coast to coast.
The overall conference theme was
``Engineering education reaches new
heights.'' The main plenary speaker
was Woodie Fowers, professor of
Mechanical Engineering at MIT and a
leader in engineering education and
pioneered the infamous Introduction to
Design course at MIT, which
``morphed'' into the First Robotics
Competition which today attracts
20,000 high school students to
participate by building a robot to
perform a specific task
The ELD runs an almost parallel
program with sessions designed around
the work and challenges facing
engineering librarians. Most attendees
are academic librarians who serve as
the lead or member of a team of
engineering and technology librarians
at institutions where there is an
undergraduate and usually a graduate
school of engineering. The ``Get
acquainted'' session was arranged
around themes and special interests
which define our work today, and
included discussion tables on virtual
reference, information literacy,
collection development, distance
education, etc. Just prior to this
conference, ELD endorsed a Best
Practices for Electronic Resources. It
can be found at www.lib.ucdavis.edu/
Eld/PunchListMay16approved2.pdf
Papers and themes were more fully
explored in sessionsdevoted to scholarly
communication, libraries as a place,
collection development, federated
searching, engineering ethics, and
library instruction. This year, ELD was
the recipient of one of ASEE's
Distinguished Lecturers and the invited
speaker was noted author and speaker,
Roy Tennant from the California Digital
Library, where he manages the
eScholarship Web and Services Design
program. He addressed the themes of
building and sustaining digital content
and also ran a workshop on ``XML in a
nutshell'' which promoted the utility of
XML in different li brary applications ,
standardsand services.
Specifically of interest was the
session on federated searching where
colleagues from MIT shared how they
came to determine and definefunctional
requirements for a metasearch tool.
This orientation towards more portal
development that enables a larger
variety of sources to be searched at once
if metadata are available and users can
retrieve different types of materials and
information instead of repeating the
search strategy in separate arenas, for
books, journal articles, patents, etc.
Colleagues at the University of Illinois,
Urbana/Champaign suggested how
different applications for metasearch
technologies in reference work and
search navigation are being developed.
The local host was Science and
Engineering staff at the Marriott
Library at the University of Utah. The
IEEE hosted a wonderful reception
there and if you want to visit that library
virtually and see some of the projects in
which they are currently engaged go to
www.utah.edu/libraries_computing/
index.html Elsevier and its subsidiary,
Engineering Information were hosts of
the annual banquet at a fashionable
downtown restaurant to which one
could walk and take in the glorious
range of mountains that surround the
valley of Salt Lake. The recipient of the
Homer Babbage
Service award this year was Mel
DeSart, head of the Engineering
Library at the University of
Washington. Additional information
about this conference and ELD can be
found at www.lib.ucdavis.edu/eld/ and
for next year when the conference will
be in Portland, Oregon June 12-15,
2005, consult www.asee.org/about/
events/conferences/annual/future/index.
cfm
Julia Gelfand (jgelfand@uci.edu)is
the Applied Sciences and Engineering
Librarian at the University of
California, Irvine Libraries, Irvine,
California, USA and co-editor of
LHTN.
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