updated 2002-01-14
Robert Teeter's
page contains links to resources useful in his work as a librarian in a
California water agency.
Our local School of Engineering library listserver
How to access U of G library resources
Best nearby and distant engineering libraries
Best engineering indexes
To generate interest in the engineering collection at the U of Guelph, I set up the
engineering library listserver in summer of 1996. Traffic is not expected to be heavy, and
the signal-to-noise ratio is expected to be exceptionally high. Here you will find
exceptional tips on how to use the UoG library and its indexes from your desktop. Also,
faculty in the School who are members of various library committees are also members of
this list, and your helpful suggestions will certainly be carried forward (no library
staff are subscribers!)
Share your ideas, and helpful tips with the rest of us by posting them on this list - to
join: send a one-line email:
SUBSCRIBE ENGLIB-L Your Name
to: listserv@listserv.uoguelph.ca or by
clicking here. Do not include any signature, subject or other info.
You will receive more info.
When you leave campus for some time don't forget to UNSUBSCRIBE the same way.
Click here to reach the Trellis (Tri-Univ) catalog. To compare this and other library catalogs, choose the names of a few researchers who may be important in your work , e.g., the name of your favourite professor or advisor, and the authors of the key reference books you are using. Then do an author search using surname and firstnames, and note the number of hits and titles of important works.
Make no mistake: University libraries in Canada are excellent by any standards! This includes our own library and those of neighboring engineering universities ( Waterloo - 30 mins West ; McMaster 40 mins South, and U of Toronto - 60 mins East ). Of these three, UoT has the biggest library, but not necessarily in your field of interest. All engineering students at Guelph may easily and quickly become members of the other three libraries by presenting your Guelph IDs in person. Of the three that are nearby, the Thode Science and Engineering Library at McMaster is a real pleasure to use. Remember that the Ontario Universities operate a special free daily mail delivery service called "IUTS".
Since the SoE at UoG is not a big player in either the Engineering world or the library world, one might expect the Engineering collection at Guelph not to be top flight. Wrong! For example, together with a couple of grad students (Jenny Wang and Jenny Hancock), I recently conducted an in-depth survey of the journal collections in Water Resources Engineering, and found that, of the top fifteen journals, each of the four Universities had about twelve, eleven of which were held in common (thus demonstrating how inefficient the system still is). I expect that this would be true also for our Biological, Agricultural, Food and Environmental Engineering collections. But of course one would reasonably expect the traditional civil, mechanical, electrical and other engineering collections to be much stronger at the other three U's.
At the next level, a good bet are the large university libraries in nearby Michigan, about a three-hour drive away from Guelph. The Detroit area in particular has an incredible connection to engineering, particularly manufacturing, and the libraries at U of Michigan (in Ann Arbor) ; Wayne State University (Detroit), the City of Detroit and Michigan State U (East Lansing) are truly amazing. The collections are accessible by Internet and the catalogs are integrated and available from each site, giving access to probably 25 million books (I'm guessing!).
Venturing slightly further afield, MIT may offer additional engineering collections that warrant investigation. Check out its catalog. MIT is about a one-hour flight from here. There are probably comparable libraries even further away in the USA.
Of course if your concern lies beyond engineering, your best bets may be the Canadian National Library (for Canadian works), the Library of Congress (for US works) and Oxford U (for all works published in the UK). European libraries are not as useful as you may expect, though their catalogs are interesting. I have found them to be slow at getting new titles on-line. It is said that Cambridge U's library is good for engineering, but I have found it to be not nearly as good as Guelph's, at least for my area of expertise.
Here I will need help for accessing indexes from student workstations. In the mean time, for those who are interested in Water Resources
Engineering, click here for an
incredible collection of links to technical water information.
Copyright by Professor William James, and must be properly acknowledged e.g.: James, William. (1996). Web pages Welcome to my outreach desktop. U. of Guelph, Sch of Eng'rg. Http://eos.uoguelph.ca/webfiles/james/index.html