May 1, 2007
(Criterion 2.3.1)
Provide information on library facilities and services available to the engineering students and faculty. As appropriate, include comments on the following aspects as well as other pertinent information.
Describe the location of the engineering collections, sets of Canadian and foreign standards and design codes, reference services, database computer search capabilities and interlibrary loan services available. Indicate the hours when library facilities are available to engineering students.
Describe the study space availability, the total number of books and periodicals and the approximate number of acquisitions in the past three years. Indicate the amount of funding allocated to the engineering fields for library acquisitions in the past three years.
Provide a self-assessment of the current library facilities and services, including strengths and shortcomings, for the education of engineering students.
The Library collections for Engineering, Mathematics, and Science are housed in the Davis Centre Library in the William G. Davis Computer Research Centre. The Davis Centre, home to offices for most faculty members in the Systems Design Engineering Department and to some faculty members in the Electrical & Computer Engineering Department, is centrally located on campus and is accessible to other Engineering buildings through interior corridors.
| Monday - Thursday | 8 am – midnight | 9 am – 8 pm |
| Friday | 8 am - midnight | 9 am – 5 pm |
| Saturday - Sunday | 11 am – midnight | 1 pm – 5 pm (Sunday only) |
Information desk hours are 9 am – 5 pm, Monday through Friday during the Spring term. Building hours prior to and during exam periods are extended to 24 hours with the exception of 2 am to 8 am on Sundays when the Library is closed. Between terms the Davis Centre Library is open from 8 am – 6 pm, Monday through Friday and from noon – 6 pm on weekends. The Library is open on statutory holidays during the academic terms.
Reference assistance is available in person or by telephone at the Library's Information Desk which is staffed by professional librarians and specially trained library associates. Alternatively, UW students, faculty and staff may get reference assistance via e-mail and on-line chat available through the Ask a Librarian service (http://www.lib.uwaterloo.ca/asklib/index.html).
Individuals or groups with more complex questions can consult their Liaison Librarian. A Liaison Librarian is assigned to work with each Engineering department and is knowledgeable about the subject matter and nature of the teaching in the department. The Liaison Librarian can be contacted directly by email or telephone if a personal visit to the Library is not convenient.
Liaison Librarians work with faculty members to help students develop the information competencies which are vital for lifelong learning. In consultation with faculty members, Liaison Librarians develop and conduct class specific information literacy sessions for undergraduate students. Lectures, hands-on instruction, and web pages support these activities as do the development of online modules and quizzes in the course management system (UW-ACE).
UW campus libraries also offer general orientation programs, workshops on database searching and using the Web. In addition, each fall the Library participates in a campus-wide orientation program for international students.
The decision to purchase Library materials for Engineering is the responsibility of the Liaison Librarians in consultation with the Faculty Library Representatives. Selection is guided by the Collection Development Policies which are developed by the Liaison Librarian in consultation with faculty members in each of the Engineering departments. Materials are obtained in a variety ways including firm orders, open orders, approval plans, and subscriptions.
In response to user preference, the Library obtains resources in electronic format whenever it is possible and practical to do so. Some electronic resources are obtained directly by the University of Waterloo Library and some are obtained through membership in the Ontario Council of University Libraries (OCUL) and the Canadian Research Knowledge Network (CRKN). Access to and use of electronic resources is generally governed by licence agreements with the publisher or vendor.
The UW Library collection includes approximately 995 current Engineering ejournals and the 528 Computer Science ejournals are also of interest to students in Engineering, especially Software Engineering. Many of the ejournals are paid for through the central Electronic Resources library fund. The individual Engineering library funds support the cost of 318 current journal (print or electronic) subscriptions and the Computer Science library fund supports the cost of 22 current journal subscriptions. The Davis Library collection also includes over 105,000 monographs in all engineering areas and computer science. For the most part, these monographs are in print format but an increasing number are in electronic format.
The UW Library, along with the libraries of the University of Guelph (UG) and Wilfrid Laurier University (WLU), is a member of the Tri-University Group of Libraries (TUG) consortium. Collections from the University of Guelph and Wilfrid Laurier University enhance the depth and breadth of local materials available in subject areas of interest to Engineering such as agricultural engineering, business, and international development.
The Library has purchased or subscribes to a range of electronic resources including research databases, full text journals, monographs, numeric data, and government publications. In addition, the Library identifies and provides access to select material freely available through the Internet. Such material includes open access journals, patent databases, technical reports, catalogues of libraries around the world, dictionaries, encyclopaedias, and style guides.
The following are some of the electronic resources of particular interest to Engineering:
The UW Map Library has an ever-growing collection of GIS data and environmental data available for use by UW faculty, students and staff.
Standards and Codes:
The Davis Centre Library has standards and codes from a variety of sources. We have full sets of some, such as those from ASME (Boiler & Pressure Vessel Code), ASTM, CSA, and CGSB in print, and a few, such as IEEE, electronically. There are many other cases where we have some but not all of the standards issued by a particular agency or association (ANSI, AWWA, BSI, DIN, & ISO); this selective collecting is due to volume, cost and demand. Building codes, both provincial and national are available in both the Davis Library and the Musagetes Architecture Library.
The Library’s print collections for Engineering are housed primarily in the Davis Centre Library. Access to the entire Library collection, as well materials held by UG and WLU, is available through the Web accessible union catalogue known as TRELLIS (http://trellis1.tug-libraries.on.ca/).
The Library's automated circulation system allows users to charge out materials when the Library is open and to renew items online at any time. With the exception of reference materials and the current issues of journals, most of the materials in the Library’s collection circulate.
Books and journal articles not owned by the UW Library but held by UG or WLU may be requested through TRELLIS. Books and copies of journal articles are delivered to faculty, staff and students within three working days. The cost is of these services are absorbed by the Library.
In partnership with UG and WLU, the Library owns a facility, known as the Annex, which is used to house low-use research material such as books, journals and copies of superseded standards and codes. In keeping with the University’s research intensive status, an agreement among the TUG libraries provides opportunity to retain last copies of this low-use material in perpetuity. The agreement can be found at:
http://www.lib.uwaterloo.ca/staff/irmc/last_copy_agreement_sept06.html. As with material from UG and WLU, books and copies of journal articles housed in the Annex are made available to faculty, staff and students within three working days. The cost is absorbed by the Library.
Books and copies of articles from print journals will be sent, upon request, to students living some distance from the campus. With the exception of return postage for books, the cost is absorbed by the Library.
The primary tool for accessing electronic resources selected by the Library is its Web site (http://www.lib.uwaterloo.ca). This site organizes and provides access to licensed resources available to UW faculty, students and staff, as well as Internet resources freely available to anyone. The site also provides access to electronic resources hosted by the OCUL Scholars Portal program (http://www.scholarsportal.info/index.html) and available to the UW community through the Library's participation in consortial purchasing through OCUL. In addition, many of our electronic resources can be found through a search of Google Scholar (http://scholar.google.com/) and Windows Live Academic (http://academic.live.com/).
The Library has embedded linking technology (SFX) into research databases which allows users to link directly from the database to the UW Library full text electronic journal subscription or to the TRELLIS catalogue record for holdings and call number information. The Library also provides access to the bibliographic management software RefWorks.
UW faculty, students and staff may access electronic research databases and full text electronic journals from off-campus via the Library’s Proxy Server / Connect from Home feature.
The University of Waterloo has depository status for Canadian Federal and Ontario government publications. Also available to members of the UW academic community are the data holdings of the Tri-University Group Data Resources (TDR) (http://tdr.tug-libraries.on.ca). This data service provides Web access to sources such as, for example, the Canadian Census, Statistics Canada surveys, and the data holdings of the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
The Interlibrary Loan/Document Delivery (ILL) service provides faculty, students, and staff with books, copies of journal articles, theses, and government documents from libraries (other than TUG) within Canada and abroad. The UW Library uses the RACER Web based interlibrary loan system (http://racer.scholarsportal.info/vdx/index.html) to facilitate ILL access and service for users. With minor exceptions, the cost for this service is absorbed by the Library.
The UW Library also uses the CISTI Source current awareness and document delivery service (http://source.cisti.nrc.ca/index_custom.html) from the Canada Institute for Scientific and Technical Information to provide copies of articles from journals not held by the UW Library or available via document delivery from the University of Guelph or Wilfrid Laurier University.
Canadian university libraries extend in-person borrowing privileges to students, faculty and staff from across the country. Graduate students, faculty and staff are entitled to borrowing privileges at participating libraries (http://www.coppul.ca/rb/rbindex.html).
The Davis Centre Library has a seating capacity of 852. Study space is available in areas designated for silent study, at group study tables and in any of the 5 group study rooms. Wireless internet access is available in the Library and 110 Internet connection drops throughout the Library provide additional Internet access for students using laptops. The Library provides laptop printing from these wireless and wired connections. Students have access to 39 express workstations and another 39 public workstations in our Information Commons. All Library workstations provide access to MS Office, Internet and library software and are connected to the networked printing system.
| Number of books in: | ||
engineering, mathematics, & sciences (Total) |
208,422 |
|
engineering |
68,559 |
|
computer science |
37,163 |
|
| Number of current journals in: | ||
engineering, mathematics, & sciences (Total ) |
(print) 668 |
(electronic) 3,392 |
engineering |
(print) 261 |
(electronic) 995 |
computer science |
(print) 60 |
(electronic) 528 |
*The numbers listed above for engineering and computer science are a subset of the total number of books and journals in engineering, mathematics &sciences. Current journals may be purchased by a Liaison Librarian using individual Engineering library funds or they may be purchased through the central Electronic Resources library fund.
| Books (Print) | 2002/03 |
2003/04 |
2004/05 |
2005/06 |
| Davis Library (Total) | 4,338 |
4,272 |
3,579 |
4,502 |
| Engineering | 650 |
616 |
651 |
824 |
| Computer Science | 218 |
296 |
163 |
223 |
| Journals (Print & Electronic) | ||||
| Davis Library (Total) | 1,469 |
1,354 |
1,190 |
1,180 |
| Engineering | 422 |
384 |
321 |
318 |
| Computer Science | 25 |
22 |
22 |
22 |
*These totals represent the materials acquired through the individual Engineering Library funds only. Electronic resources such as SPIE, IEEE/IEE Electronic Library, and the ACM Digital Library are purchased from the central Electronic Resources Library fund. Many electronic resources are purchased as packages of the publisher’s entire list of titles, and include titles in many subject areas. As a result, the number of publications available to students, within the Library and from any computer, has actually grown.
| Books | 2002/03 |
2003/04 |
2004/05
|
2005/06 |
| Davis Library (Total) | $394,136 |
$405,209 |
$356,338 |
$397,237 |
| Engineering | $117,974 |
$112,667 |
$100,419 |
$101,574 |
| Computer Science | $59,695 |
$58,109 |
$53,049 |
$82,894 |
| Journals | ||||
| Davis Library (Total) | $1,018,296 |
$920,961 |
$577,454 |
$569,920 |
| Engineering | $238,715 |
$235,571 |
$123,879 |
$102,698 |
| Computer Science | $11,551 |
$8,673 |
$6,167 |
$5,476 |
| Total | ||||
| Davis Library (Total) | $1,412,432 |
$1,326,170 |
$933,793 |
$967,157 |
| Engineering | $356,689 |
$348,238 |
$224,299 |
$204,272 |
| Computer Science | $71,246 |
$66,782 |
$59,216 |
$88,370 |
*These totals represent the amount spent through the individual Engineering Library funds only. Many current subscriptions for journals previously paid for by Engineering library funds have been transferred to the Electronic Resources library fund resulting in a decline in expenditures from the individual engineering funds. While there has been a decline in individual library funds, the table below shows the increase in the Electronic Resources Fund expenditures.
| Electronic Resources | 2002/03 | 2003/04 | 2004/05 | 2005/06 |
| $2,527,384 | $3,904,830 | $3,897,065 | $4,080,737 |
Overall, the information services available to students and faculty are excellent. In a 2006 Library Satisfaction survey, 79% of Davis Library users agreed that “the Library and staff met expectations for an excellent University Library”.
A new inventory and security system based on a one-tag RFID system has been installed in the Library. RFID tags have been added to items in our collections and as a result the self checkout process has been streamlined and new security gates have been installed in the Library.
For some time now, most indexes and abstracts have been available electronically, and the Library now provides access to over 13,000 electronic journals. In the past several years the Library has been able to increase journal holdings by purchasing large packages from publishers mainly through our participation in consortial deals through OCUL and CRKN. In the 2006 Satisfaction Survey, Davis Centre Library users ranked their satisfaction with electronic resources (research databases, ejournals, e-books, etc.) as 2nd in a list of 16 library resources, services, & facilities.
To this point, we have been able to meet the majority of our user’s expectations quite well but with expanding programmes (for example, Nanotechnology and Mechatronics) we will require an increase in the base budget if we are to acquire materials to support new programs and continue to meet user expectations.
Although we would like to provide online access to a wider selection of standards (such as ASTM or SAE) and handbooks (such as those from CRC ENGnetBASE, Knovel) these products charge subscription and ongoing access fees that exceed the capabilities of our budget. Similarly, while Engineering has definitely benefited from consortial and block purchases of ejournals there is a proliferation of electronic resources (such as the Proceedings of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers – both current and archives) coming onto the market and we will only be able to afford these resources if we have new money on an ongoing basis.
An estimated 5,000 people enter the Davis Library daily and during the fall and winter terms and the facility is often full to capacity during the day and through the evening hours. When asked in the Satisfaction Survey mentioned above to rank the value of 16 library resources, services, & facilities, users of the Davis Centre Library ranked library hours first, library environment (noise, temperature, lighting, ambience, etc) second, and study space third. When asked how satisfied they were with these library resources, services, & facilities, Davis Centre Library users ranked Library hours first but study space fell to 10th in the satisfaction ranking and Library environment fell to 12th. While we are actively improving the quality of study space in the Library through renovation projects, replacement of study carrels, etc., we do not have enough room in the Library to provide additional study space to meet student demand and the crowded conditions make it difficult to address library environment issues such as noise and ambience. Increasing the amount of study space in the Library would require removing or relocating collections or building an addition to the Library. As the availability of adequate study space is a not just a problem in the Davis Centre Library but a campus wide issue, the construction of additional study space on campus is needed to address the problem.
Prepared by:
Jennifer Haas, Head of Information Services and Resources, Davis Centre Library
Anne Fullerton, Liaison Librarian for Chemical Engineering
Doug Morton, Liaison Librarian for Civil and Environmental Engineering, Mechanical and Mechatronics Engineering, Management Sciences
Leeanne Romane, Liaison Librarian for Systems Design Engineering
Reviewed by Susan Routliffe, Associate University Librarian, Information Resources & Services, on behalf of Mark Haslett, University Librarian.
May 1, 2007
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