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Original question (BUSLIB-L, Marcia J. Rodney, October 18, 2004)

We're evaluating Knovel, the Engnetbase via Engineering Village, and Referex. I reviewed BUSLIB and SOLOLIB archives, and while I've seen numerous postings on Knovel, I haven't seen anything that really addresses which resource your engineers and other techy types would choose if they had to pick just one. If they'd prefer yet a different resource, let me know. I'd also be interested in hearing from the academic librarians which resource your students gravitate to.

Responses
1. Our decision has been to subscribe only to Knovel. It has a vast section devoted to our industry, plastics and rubber, plus its unique interactive graphs and charts have a technological edge over anything I have seen from EI Eng. Village and the rest of them. (Peter Bowler, Polyone)

2. I'd say it depends on which products/services you subscribe to from these vendors, and which ones your patrons need. Knovel, for example, has dozens of products available. We subscribe only to Handbook of Chemistry and Physics, which is used fairly heavily. There are many other things they can provide, and regularly suggest to us, but none have yet reached the level of demand for us to subscribe.

To me it is like whether or not you should go with Ebsco or FirstSearch. Which has what you need, and if they both have the same DB, as they often do, which is cheaper and/or which has the better search interface, more frequent updating, etc.

No simple answers out there.... (Dan Lester)

3. The NEIC Library uses Knovel and has been helpful for tough chem questions. I have not heard of the other two. (Barbara Wagner, NEIC, EPA)

4. We use ENGnetBASE, MATERIALSnetBASE, ENVIROnetBASE, Knovel, and NANOnetBASE (which isn't much yet, but will be soon, so CRC says). We also have CHEMnetBASE, which isn't full text, except for the CRC HofCP. I mention these products in instruction classes to design engineers, and they like them and use them a lot. I'm not a fan of netLibrary - I don't like that users must check out an online title, and once that has happened, no one else has access to it until it is "returned". (Randy Reichardt, University of Alberta)

5. We have access to Referex, ENGnetBASE, MATERIALSnetBASE, ENVIROnetBASE, Wiley Online Books, ebrary, and Knovel. Each collection is unique but some titles MATERIALSnetBASE are also available in ENGnetBASE. We have found all collections very useful to our engineering students. They are heavily used. We got REFEREX during summer and we are teaching it during our classes, informal meeting with student groups and associations, and various departmental seminars. During this fall, app. 800 engineering students have joined and during winter term all these students are going to have research seminar from the library. All other ebook collections will also be demonstrated. There are some classes for which we use webCT. I am linking some specific books from ENGnetBASE and other collections through their course pages in webCT motivating students to explore them further. The key thing is developing awareness about these collections to as many faculty and students as possible and seeking feedback from them in terms of their usability, usefulness, ease of use, searching capabilities, etc. ebrary provides access to many engineering books. Just yesterday, during my class on Biosensors, I was able to illustrate and interesting chapters on Bionanotechnology.

REFEREX is relatively new for us and hence I am taking every opportunity that I have to show it to my faculty and students. We also have access to CHEmnetBASE, and INFOSECURITYnetBASE. While I am writing this, a faculty member just told me that he was about to request a book through ILL that he did not know was available through ENGnetBASE. Coincidentally, he came to know this online edition last week when we did a seminar to our Civil Engineering faculty and students as part of their weekly seminar. Elsevier, and Knovel - both provided instructional handouts in plenty. I used them to give out to almost 300 students whom I met during our student orientation last week.

Some of you have seen our engineering tutorial which I will be using this term to my engineering students. ENGnetBASE and REFEREX are illustrated in it.

Overall, our students enjoying having online access to these books. Some students do prefer to use print but then if the book was checked out, other students can not use it. Clear advantage of an online book.

My questions are:

How do they decide which books are going to be available online? For example, Elsevier, Wiley, CRC, etc. publish number of books but not all of them are online. Many books appear on my shelf (in Print) through our approval plan and MOST are NOT available ONLINE. Some may become online later on but if I know that they will be online later, I may decide to send print versions back. Right now, I am keeping them in Print.

The most cumbersome part is for me is checking each collection separately, and its time-consuming. Can all publishers unite and work towards a common database so that it will be easy for us to see whether the online counterpart is available? Indicate when it is going to be made available also. (Just a thought - I am not sure if it is feasible at all)

I think KNOVEL and REFEREX may need to think about alternate names by which to identify their collection because they do not seem to indicate scientific or engineering books unless we make it clear on our web site. Hence, the importance of our outreach and partnership in working with them. What are your opinions on this?

Link each resource from webCT, Blackboard, and class pages if possible. Our use of KNOVEL and ENGnetBASE has gone up considerably and I expect the same for REFEREX. (Jay Bhatt, Drexel University)

6. I'm not sure if cost is an issue, but I can tell you for the basic Knovel package of over 600 electronic engineering books, the cost is $17-20K. Engnetbase has around 250 books these day and the cost is $5-6K. We have both here, but we just recently added Knovel. There isn't any overlap so that is good. I have just received information from EI about Referex, but it just looks duplicative.

I don't know if all have the products. I know that a few have both or one. I know that at Johnson, we had many people asking for Knovel especially from smaller research areas within Engineering like Textiles. We had tried it several times and the response was very impressive. (Elizabeth Willoughby, Johnson Space Center)

7. We subscribe to EV 2 (Engineering village) with the EngNet and Referex options and my end users love it. We've never used Knovel. (Natalia Lebedeva, Lam Research)

Edited on September 23, 2005