Skip to main content

Access to Compendex Plus Changing on January 1, 2000

December 7, 1999 Author: CDLCategories:

UC’s interim access to the Compendex Plus database on SilverPlatter’s ERL system will end on December 31, 1999. Beginning January 1, 2000, UC users will access the Compendex Plus database directly from Engineering Information’s own Web site.

As you may recall, UC’s SilverPlatter access to Compendex came about by virtue of a contract with Engineering Information to license the database as a local load tape mount.  Many changes ensued between the 1996 signing and the present, including the creation of the CDL and Ei’s development of its own Web site as a platform to deliver access to its databases (including Compendex Plus).  Ei worked with UC librarians over the past year to improve its interface. See also the item in the November 2, 1999 issue of CDLINFO [http://www.cdlib.org/news/cdlinfo/cdlinfo110299.html].

One advantage of accessing Compendex Plus via Ei’s Web site is that UC users will now have access to abstracting and indexing for hundreds of additional titles via Ei Page One, Ei’s other engineering database that has been merged in this Web version with the Compendex Web database.  Ei Page One is a table-of-contents database with approximately 2,800 additional titles indexed cover-to-cover.  (There is some overlap with INSPEC, but INSPEC is not cover-to-cover.) Compendex Web is now the world’s largest multidisciplinary engineering database with 5,000,000 records, growing at 500,000 new records each year.

Ei will soon be implementing links from the Compendex Plus database to UC periodical holdings.

Ei now offers access to a wide variety of engineering information via Ei Village, to which UC will also have access.   Access to Ei Village has several important advantages:

  1. Access to licensed full content such as Elsevier’s ScienceDirect journals via Engineering Direct (links to approximately 600 Elsevier journals available via Ei Village).  Ei is in the process of adding content from many additional publishers to Ei Village, such as Institute of Physics (IoP), with which UC recently signed a contract for access to article content.
  2. Online access to a large collection of industry standards, specifications, and technical books via the CSSINFO Web site, from over 300 standards publishers, many of which are downloadable in PDF format.

The URL for Ei Village is: [http://hood2.ei.org/eivill/plsql/village.serve_page?p=1280]

The URL for Compendex Web is: [http://hood2.ei.org/eivill/plsql/switch.main]

Outreach and instruction materials provided by Ei are available on the CDL’s revamped “Adaptable Outreach Materials” page [http://www.cdlib.org/services/info_services/instruct/].

UC librarians are working with Engineering Information to enhance the Compendex Plus interface to provide scholarly access to engineering materials.  As you use the Ei interface and Ei Village, please direct comments to the Ei Resource Liaison, Michele Potter (michelle.potter@ucr.edu).

Watch this space for more information on other resources, such as additional publishers’ full content, as they become accessible via Ei Village.