New ebook collection added to catalogue

Hello everyone!

Ebook records for Morgan and Claypool's Synthesis Digital Library have been added to the catalogue. A product description and sample titles are included below.

Special thanks to ITS for their help with this collection!

--Aaron Wood

Synthesis Digital Library of Engineering and Computer Science

SYNTHESIS is an innovative information service for the research, development and educational communities in engineering and computer science. It combines authoritative content with advanced digital delivery to create a product that is substantially more useful than traditional print and digital publications.

Content, Structure, and Scope

The basic component of the library is a 50- to 100-page electronic book that synthesizes an important research or development topic, authored by a prominent contributor to the field. We call these Lectures and believe that they offer unique value to the reader by providing more synthesis, analysis, and depth than typical research journal articles. They are also more modular and dynamic than traditional print or digital handbooks, such as collected volumes and monographs. We believe that they are ideal entry points to new areas for researchers, advanced developers, and students.

SYNTHESIS is organized by series, each managed by a prominent consulting editor. The series editor oversees lecture topic and author selection as well as peer review to assure quality. SYNTHESIS launched in October 2005 with an initial selection of series in engineering and computer science. New titles in each series will be posted to the site as they become available.

Additional series and titles will be added and revised as necessary. This constant influx makes the library dynamic in a way that has never been achieved with existing print or electronic products. Over time, SYNTHESIS will grow to encompass the entire scope of its subject disciplines. Our goal is to create one of the largest and most complete compilations of knowledge in engineering and computer science.
Audience

SYNTHESIS is expected to be useful to a broad range of professionals, researchers, and students.

For the researcher, it provides an ideal introduction to new fields. This is an increasingly important benefit as science and engineering become more interdisciplinary.

For the practicing engineer, it provides a method of staying current on developments in research at university, corporate, and government labs.

For the professor and student, it provides a source of information on advanced topics that will be more accessible than the journal literature and that can be relied upon to be authoritative and complete. SYNTHESIS titles are available to licensing institutions campus-wide with unlimited concurrent use. Titles can also be saved, printed, and emailed, making them perfect courses of any size.
Key Features and Advantages

The Lecture format:

* Enables user to more efficiently find information specific to their interest.
* Allows for a high level of authoritativeness, as authors focus on their area of active research.
* Enables the library to be extremely current since Lectures in fast moving fields will be frequently updated. Also, Lectures are published as soon as they are completed rather than when the last in a batch is finished (as with print reference works).
* Offers the potential to be exhaustively complete since the format can accommodate contributions on even the most specialized topics.

Both simple and advanced searching is supported with the ability to personalize and save results.

SYNTHESIS incorporates extensive reference linking both internally and externally. External linking using CrossRef and OpenURL standards provides instant access to linked sources from subscribed publishers.

An email alerting service delivers notification of the availability of new Lectures and new hits based on saved searches.

SYNTHESIS is indexed by Google as well as science and engineering indexing services.



--
Aaron Wood
Metadata Librarian
Bibliographic Services
Libraries and Cultural Resources
University of Calgary
Phone: (403) 220-6161
Fax: (403) 284-2109
aawood@ucalgary.ca