New SPIE Digital Library Platform

Valuable additional content, semantic integration, remote access, and personalization features are among the enhancements made to the SPIE Digital Library over the summer as it moved to a new platform.

Subscribers and visitors to the SPIE Digital Library will now find, along with continually added new content from SPIE journals, conference proceedings, and e-Books:

• The addition of 40,000 technical articles published between 1962 and 1989 from the Proceedings of SPIE and Optical Engineering, extending coverage of both back to Volume 1.
• Topical collections in more than 120 subject areas, highlighting the newest technical papers in semantically related areas
• Remote access, enabling researchers and students to use the SPIE Digital Library via their institution’s subscription from anywhere
• Access via a single username and password for all SPIE websites
• Links from articles to author profiles on SPIE.org, showing the SPIE publications, activities, and accomplishments of authors
• Tools for creating and managing e-mail alerts; saving figures and tables of interest; and activating remote access

“We are excited to announce the launch of the new SPIE Digital Library site,” said Eric Pepper, SPIE director of Publications. “We are also pleased to extend the Digital Library back to 1962 when SPIE’s first technical paper was published. We often hear how valuable this early material is to the engineers and scientists working in our community.”

SPIE chose the Silverchair SCM6 platform largely because its semantic capabilities “mesh well with our vision for providing a truly integrated information resource that employs our new optics and photonics taxonomy,” Pepper said. “This technology enables us to draw connections between topically related information across the SPIE corpus, link to valuable content from other sources, and facilitate user personalization.”

The design and user interface of the new SPIE Digital Library platform emphasizes usability and content presentation and integration, he added.

The SPIE Digital Library is the most extensive research resource on optics and photonics, with approximately 375,000 technical papers from SPIE Journals and Proceedings of SPIE and 167 SPIE Press eBooks. SPIE publishes nearly 20,000 new technical articles and 15 to 20 new eBooks in the SPIE Digital Library each year.

Earlier this year, SPIE announced a freeze on subscription prices for 2013, the fourth freeze or price decrease in as many years, in response to financial pressures faced by subscribing libraries.

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