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Acquiring technical standards connects libraries with vendors who are very protective, legally and technologically, of their products. To conform to the technical restrictions placed on standards, librarians must think creatively and adopt a workflow more labor-intensive than with other publications. This article presents a case study of one institution, a basic discussion of the issues surrounding the addition of technical standards to a library collection, and a stepwise process for the situation in which a patron requests an individual standard. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Elsevier's Compendex product (and its ancestor, Engineering Index) has been a de rigeur indexing tool for searching the primary literature in engineering for many years. However, the price of Compendex continues to rise while at the same time, broader, lower-cost or even free alternatives to such expensive indexing tools have proliferated. This paper seeks to quantitatively and, to a lesser extent, qualitatively compare Compendex to Google Scholar. In this paper, the author used a combination of methodologies in prior comparisons of both Google Scholar and Compendex to other indexing services and to each other. We undertook a quantitative comparison of the retrieval capabilities of the two indexing tools with the specific aim of examining Google's suitability to be a primary indexing tool for engineering literature. The author also considered additional factors regarding the ease-of-use and ‘added value’ features of the two interfaces. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

This paper examines the definition of a "virtual library" by observing the experiences of two such libraries in the Cornell University Library system: Physical Sciences and Engineering. In the past five years, both of these libraries closed their physical collections because of budget and print use issues. Since the closure of the collections, both libraries--and their librarians--had to imagine what a virtual library could be and what services could support a highly technical user base that relied on e-journals and e-books. This paper discusses staffing considerations, new approaches in collection development, and the evolution of library roles for the libraries operating in this new model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]