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 School of Computer Science and 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.
Day |
Building Hours, Circulation / Reserves (Fall, Winter, Spring terms) |
Information Desk (Fall and Winter terms) |
|---|---|---|
Monday - Thursday |
8 am – midnight |
10 am – 7 pm |
Friday |
8 am - midnight |
10 am – 5 pm |
Saturday - Sunday |
11 am – midnight |
1 pm – 5 pm (Sunday only) |
During the Spring term Information desk hours are 10 am – 5 pm, Monday through Friday. Information Desk staff are on call from 9 am – 10 am weekdays to answer questions in the Fall, Winter and Spring terms.
Prior to and during exam periods building hours 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, reference assistance is available via e-mail, on-line chat or Skype 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 that 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).
uWaterloo 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 license agreements with the publisher or vendor.
The uWaterloo Library collection includes approximately 1297 current Engineering journals, the majority of which are available in electronic format. The Davis Library collection also includes over 1,000 monographs in areas dealing closely with mechatronics and over 170,000 monographs in subject areas of relevant interest in engineering, mathematics and sciences. For the most part, these monographs are in print format but an increasing number are in electronic format.
The uWaterloo 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 and business.
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, encyclopedias, and style guides.
The following are some of the electronic resources of particular interest to Mechatronics Engineering:
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) and CGSB in print, and a few, such as ASTM, Canadian Standards Association and 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 PRIMO (http://primo.lib.uwaterloo.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 uWaterloo Library but held by UG or WLU may be requested through PRIMO. 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 uWaterloo 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 uWaterloo 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/ ).
The Library has embedded linking technology (SFX) into research databases which allows users to link directly from the database to the uWaterloo Library full text electronic journal subscription or to the PRIMO catalogue record for print holdings and call number information. The Library also provides access to the bibliographic management software RefWorks. uWaterloo 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 uWaterloo 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 uWaterloo 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.
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 758. Study space is available in areas designated for silent study, at group study tables and in any of the 13 bookable 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 78 workstations, all of which provide connections to MS Office, Internet and library software and the Library’s networked printing system.
Number of books, (print & electronic) in: *
Number of current journals in: **
*The numbers listed above for Engineering are a subset of the numbers reported for Engineering, mathematics & sciences. The totals have been generated by counting books and journals in the Davis Library according to their Library of Congress classification. This approach allows us to assess our collections based on the subject of the items held in our collections. Items with call numbers that are classified or further subclassified in the Q, QA, QC, QD, T, TJ, TK, AND TS call number ranges may be of interest to MME students. We have reported items in our collections with these Library of Congress call numbers as the number of books/journals in Engineering, mathematics, & sciences. Mechatronics materials are often classified with TJ163.12, TK7875, TJ211 and TJ213 call number ranges and this is what is represented above for the Mechatronics subsets.
**Current journals may be purchased by a Liaison Librarian using individual library funds or they may be purchased through the central Electronic Resources library fund. Titles purchased through the Electronic Resources fund are available in an electronic format but are not available in a manner that lends itself to counting by subject because they have been purchased in large interdisciplinary packages. Journals purchased using individual library funds may be print and/or electronic.
Books (Print) |
2007/08 |
2008/09 |
2009/10 |
|---|---|---|---|
Engineering |
1894 |
1465 |
1591 |
Mechatronics |
29 |
16 |
14 |
* Engineering totals include items (both print and electronic) purchased by fiscal year through the individual Library funds for Engineering, Science, and Mathematics. The Mechatronics totals include items purchased specifically through the Mechanical Engineering fund, classified in LC areas relevant to Mechatronics. A number of resources of interest to Engineers have been transferred over time from individual Library funds to a central Electronic Resources Library fund when access has been switched from print to online access. These resources include SPIE, IEEE/IEE Electronic Library, and the ACM Digital Library. Electronic resources are often 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 |
2005/06 |
2006/07 |
2007/08 |
2008/09 |
2009/10 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Engineering |
$ 179,755 |
$ 152,570 |
$ 156,560 |
$90,780 |
$ 163,685 |
Mechanical & Mechatronics Eng’g |
$ 25,980 |
$25,430 |
$ 20,630 |
$ 12,870 |
$23,605 |
Journals |
2005/06 |
2006/07 |
2007/08 |
2008/09 |
2009/10 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Engineering |
$ 146,565 |
$ 148,735 |
$ 137,155 |
$ 154,175 |
$ 165,080 |
Mechanical & Mechatronics Eng’g |
$ 59,105 |
$ 59,310 |
$ 57,375 |
$ 56,570 |
$ 68,835 |
Total |
2005/06 |
2006/07 |
2007/08 |
2008/09 |
2009/10 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Engineering |
$ 326,315 |
$ 301,305 |
$ 293,710 |
$ 244,950 |
$ 328,770 |
Mechanical & Mechatronics Eng’g |
$ 85,080 |
$ 84,740 |
$ 78,005 |
$ 69,440 |
$ 92,440 |
Amounts have been rounded to the nearest five dollars.
*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.
The drop in book expenditures in 2008/09 was the result of a temporary, and partial, freeze on monograph purchasing imposed because of the significant decline in the value of the Canadian dollar in the fall of 2008, and the consequent drop in the Library's purchasing power. The freeze was lifted in May 2009.
|
2005/06 |
2006/2007 |
2007/2008 |
2008/2009 |
2009/2010 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Electronic Resources |
$4,080,735 |
$3,979,880 |
|
|
|
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”.
For some time now, most indexes and abstracts have been available electronically, and the Library provides access to over 17,800 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.
We would like to provide online access to a wider selection of standards (such as SAE) and handbooks (such as those from CRC ENGnetBASE and NANOnetBASE) but vendors and publishers of these products charge subscription and ongoing access fees that exceed the capabilities of our budget. Similarly, while Engineering has benefited from consortial purchases of ejournals in packages there are new electronic resources 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. To increase the amount of study space in the Library, we would need to reduce the book and journal backrun collections, build an addition to the Library, or additional study space would have to be constructed on campus.
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