Penn State Great Valley Library Blog

Penn State Great Valley will host a weeklong slate of activities from Feb. 20 to 23 to mark National Engineers Week. Penn State Great Valley is one of hundreds of engineering societies, government agencies, corporations, businesses, and universities hosting events during National Engineers Week, which was founded in 1951 by the National Society of Professional Engineers. The campus will celebrate with the following activities:

— Monday, Feb. 20: 5 to 6 p.m., “Career Lessons Learned,” Joe Trench, executive vice president, Maritime Systems and Sensors, Locked Martin Corp.

— Tuesday, Feb. 21: 5:30 to 6:30 p.m., Engineering and Information Science Information Session for those who would like to learn more about engineering and information technology degree programs and certificates at Penn State Great Valley; 7 to 8:30 p.m., “Coming of Age in the ’60s,” an evening with award-winning poet Sonia Sanchez, brought to the public by the campus’ Diversity Action Council;

— Wednesday, Feb. 22: 2 to 3:15 p.m., “Health Systems Engineering,” Dave Cowan, executive-in-residence, Institute for Health Systems, School of Biomedical Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology; 5 to 6 p.m., meet the authors of “Antipatterns: Identification, Refactoring and Management,” Philip Laplante, associate professor, software engineering, Penn State Great Valley, and Colin Neill, associate professor, software engineering, Penn State Great Valley,

— Thursday, Feb. 23: 5 to 6 p.m., student and faculty mixer, during which participants can celebrate the conclusion of the week’s events in the main lobby with faculty members and students.

Ongoing activities include a poster session by faculty and engineering videos in the lobby of the Safeguard Scientifics Building.

All events are free to the public. For information, call (610) 725-5382.

University Libraries is pleased to announce that MultiSearch is now available under Articles and More on the LIAS homepage http://www.libraries.psu.edu

MultiSearch is a new search tool available from the Penn State Libraries. It enables users to simultaneously search various combinations of databases and resources, and then receive the results in a unified display. At any stage, users can link to the native interface of any resource to use advanced search features or services offered directly by the information provider. A special feature, MySpace, enables users to customize their search environment, create a local catalog of findings, save search histories, and define and schedule alerts to inform of relevant new materials. MultiSearch is a component of MetaLib™.

A recent reorganization will change Nancy L. Eaton’s title of dean of University Libraries to dean of Libraries and Scholarly Communications at Penn State. In December 2005, Provost Rodney Erickson announced that the Penn State University Press would report to Eaton. The new organizational home was based on recommendations of Eva Pell, vice president for Research and dean of The Graduate School (to whom the Press reported); Eaton, dean of University Libraries; and Sanford Thatcher, director of the Penn State University Press. Erickson stated that it will create a stronger collaboration that will serve the faculty and the University well into the future.

Historically, the University Libraries have been represented on the editorial board for the Penn State University Press. Activities of the last several years forged even stronger relationships between the two units, including joint establishment of the Office of Digital Scholarly Publishing; a jointly published reprint series; collaborative digitization projects; and development with Cornell University Libraries of electronic journal publishing software (DPubS).

“This collaboration will put both units in a position to partner with faculty in the utilization of emerging information technologies to provide new alternatives for the dissemination of research and scholarship,” Eaton said.

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On Tuesday, 31 January, IEEE will implement a maintenance release to the IEEE Xplore digital library. As a result, users will experience approximately three hours of downtime on that date, between 10AM and 1PM EST. IEEE has also posted a message on the IEEE Xplore home page to alert your users to the downtime.

This release adds more convenient links to request permission to reuse content, links to publication home pages from tables of contents and search results to improve navigation, and other updates.