The Compendex® Scope & Coverage Committee
Submits 2006 Recommendations

Ei is continually developing our products and database content so we can offer our customers the most up-to-date engineering information possible. A vital part of the process is the participation of our customers, and a key resource Ei relies upon is the active participation of the Compendex Scope & Coverage Committee.

Comprised of 17 engineering and technology librarians from major research institutions and companies from around the world, the members of the Compendex Scope & Coverage Committee are respected subject matter experts. The committee works together throughout the year, building toward a set of recommendations about the coverage and editorial direction of Compendex for the coming year, and submits their recommendations by the end of September each year. To aid the communication channels used by the committee, Judy Salk, Ei’s Director of Editorial Operations, created a blog in August of 2005 that facilitates the workflow of the Compendex Scope & Coverage Committee.

“Selecting content for Compendex is a critical task,” Judy comments. “It's completely fitting that we work with experts and decision-makers from within our customer base to shape and adapt the database to their evolving needs. We wanted to find a way to make it easier for committee members to participate, contribute, and interact. Having recently added blog support capabilities to Engineering Village 2™, it occurred to us that a blog could enable communication between Compendex Scope and Coverage Committee members.”

Randy Reichardt, Information Services Librarian (Engineering), Science & Technology Library, University of Alberta and, co-chair of the Scope and Coverage Committee comments about the new work process, “Blog technology helps the efforts of the Compendex Scope & Coverage Committee to be more effective and efficient, which in turn contributes to making the Compendex database a better product.”

Since blogging is a relatively new technology, not every committee member had extensive experience using blogs and some members had not used blogs at all. However, most of these members found it relatively straightforward to get started and were pleased with the outcome.

“I had never communicated via a blog before,” explains Donna Swischer, Head, Document Services Department, Linda Hall Library of Science, Engineering, and Technology. “I find it very convenient to have all the committee postings in one location rather than amassing and keeping track of e-mails. I must have 20 different mailboxes to keep track of various committees and topic threads. With the Blog, everything is centralized and labeled. It makes it very easy to track the thread of the discussion and participate.”

Pleased with the new work process, the Compendex Scope and Coverage Committee will continue using the blog for their ongoing collaboration and for their next set of recommendations due to be submitted by October 1, 2006. To view a list of serial sources under consideration for inclusion in Compendex for 2006, please click: http://www.ei.org/SCC2006.

If you are a subject specialist librarian in engineering and interested in participating in the Compendex Scope & Coverage Committee, please contact Judy Salk at j.salk@elsevier.com.

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Register Now For Online Training Sessions
Discussing Ei Patents on Engineering Village 2

Ei is offering on-line training sessions to introduce our new product offering, Ei Patents on Engineering Village 2. These sessions are open for all our customers and will demonstrate the functionalities of patents searches on our platform as well as the various uses of patent information in research.

If you wish to participate in a training session, please send an email with your preferred time and date to eitraining@elsevier.com with Engineering Village 2 Training in the subject line. Once your registration is confirmed, log-in information will be sent to you via email.

If you wish to schedule a customized session, please contact Gali Halevi via email at g.halevi@elsevier.com.

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