Guide to Shelfmarks
Journals
Electronic Books
Online Bibliographical Databases
Other Useful Library Resources
Useful Web Links

 Guide to Shelfmarks

The main collections of books can be found on Levels 4 and 5 of the Library.

Books in heavy demand are placed in the Short Loan Collection on Level 1. The Short Loan Collection contains 1 day loan books; 7 day loan books are shelved with the ordinary loan books on the upper levels.

Most Computing books are shelved on Level 5 at 518.5 (programming).

Recent computing books are on Level 4 at 004-006 or 681.3 (software engineering)

Use the Library catalogue to find the exact shelfmark and location for each book. If you are searching for books on a particular topic, use a keyword search.

 Journals

Printed Journals

These are kept in the library. Search by the journal title on the Library Catalogue to find out where a journal is shelved. Some current issues are shelved on Level 1.

Electronic Journals

The ejournals@surrey portal links to the full-text electronic journals available from the University of Surrey. You can view the full-text articles on screen and save, email, print them, create alerts for searches etc. Collections of Science e-journals are available at these sites (follow links from the ejournals@surrey portal)

 Electronic Books

You can use the Electronic Books page to access eBooks on Computing. The most useful collections for Computing textbooks will be Springer Link, Wiley-Blackwell, Safari Books Online, Lecture Notes in Computing Science, Ebrary and Knovel..

For dictionaries try Credo Reference.

There are also links from some titles on the Library catalogue to electronic versions of the text - look for "e-link"

 Online Bibliographical Databases

Online databases are the best way to search by topic for journal articles. Some databases will link to the full text of articles, others will only supply bibliographic details. Key databases for Computing are:

ACM digital library is a subscription-based service of works published by ACM and other publishers covering all aspects of computing.

IEEE Xplore is a subscription-based service with access to technical literature in computer science.

Compendex is a bibliographic database of scientific and engineering research, containing references and abstracts taken from journals, conferences and technical reports.

Inspec is a database of bibliographic abstracts and indexing to journal articles, conference proceedings, technical reports and other literature in the fields of science and technology.

ISI Web of Knowledge: Web of Science (Science Citation Index)Explore the world’s leading citation database with multidisciplinary coverage of over 10,000 high-impact journals including the sciences

Scopus is the largest abstract and citation database of peer-reviewed literature. Nearly 18,000 titles from more than 5,000 international publishers, including coverage of 16,500 peer-reviewed journals.

 Other Useful Library Resources

Newspapers

The Library takes certain daily British broadsheet newspapers. Recent copies are on Level 1 of the Library and older copies are kept on Level 2.

British newspapers and a huge variety of international papers can also be read electronically on Nexis.

Times Digital Archive, 1785-1985: The complete digital edition of The Times (London) capturing the entire newspaper, with all articles, advertisements and illustrations/photos divided into categories to facilitate searching.

Also of interest may be The Times (1910-1999) and The Sunday Times (1970-1999) which are held on microform on Level 2 of the Library.

Statistics

The Library's printed statistics collection is on Level 2. The collection includes statistics from the British Government and international organisations. There are two sequences in the statistics collection, books/monographs all with the shelfmark beginning 31 and also statistical periodicals shelved in A-Z order by title.

Check StatnetBase The full text of 70 books in the field of statistics

Some useful websites are:

National Statistics - The site for the UK's official statistics, it includes information on the economy, population, and society.

ESDS International This is a database only available by using your Athens username and password. ESDS International provides access to a range of datasets including macro data from OECD, IMF, World Bank and IEA.

Eurostat -The EU Statistical Office. It is possible to view structural, long, and short term indicators free of charge as well as the online version of Statistics in Focus which provides information on key statistical surveys.

EDC

The EDC collection is on Level 2 of the Library and contains a variety of materials produced by the Official Publications Office and other agencies and institutions of the EU

Standards and  Patents

The Standards and Patents page tells you which sets of standards are available for use in the Library and on the web and where to find them. The University Library subscribes to the complete set of British Standards Online. 

The library does not keep copies of patents. You can search for worldwide patents via the UK Patent Office web site but you cannot obtain the full text online. Once you have identified a patent you want, you can obtain a copy through the InterLibrary Loan service.

Exam Papers

The Exam Papers Database offers past papers from 1998.

Guides to Referencing

Look at the help pages provided by the University of Surrey.

Further guides are available from:

University of Birmingham and Bournemouth University (especially useful for citing electronic references.)

Also look at Pears, R. A and Shields, G. (2010) Cite them right: the essential referencing guide. 8th ed. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. which is available in the Library at 808.02 PEA

 Useful Web Links

Intute  A gateway to subject catalogues (including Computing) with links to high quality Internet sites, selected and described by specialists from within British academia.

The Virtual Training Suite offers free tutorials on Internet research skills to help with your university course.

See list of Intute weblinks below:

Reference Works Online

Free online dictionary of computing is a searchable dictionary of acronyms, jargon, programming languages, tools, architecture, operating systems, networking, theory, conventions, standards, mathematics, electronics, institutions, companies, projects, products and history covering all aspects of computing.

Sharpened glossary is an online dictionary of computer terms with definitions listed alphabetically.  

Glossary of Java related terms is a set of glossaries of Java technology related terms under the J2SE (core/desktop), J2EE 1.3 and 1.4 (enterprise/server), and J2ME (mobile/wireless) headings. It is part of the Sun Developer Network site.  

C++ standard template library programmer's guide offers comprehensive documentation of C++'s standard template library.  

Memory management glossary is an alphabetical glossary of terms relating to memory management. Exact synonyms, similar terms, rough antonyms, and alternative spellings are incorporated into definitions where they exist.  

Dictionary of algorithms and data structures is a dictionary of algorithms, algorithmic techniques, data structures, archetypical problems, and related definitions.

Online Textbooks

Understanding open source and free software licensing is a full-text book explaining licensing options, how they compare and interoperate, and how license choices affect project possibilities in the area of law surrounding open source and free software.

O'Reilly open books is a collection of books published by O'Reilly in the form of "open" copyright.

O'Reilly rough cuts is a service from Safari Books Online that gives you early access to content before it is published. When a book is bought on the Rough Cuts service, you get access to an evolving manuscript and can read it online, download as a PDF, or print.

Free tech books is a collection of free online computer science, engineering and programming books, ebooks, texts, textbooks, lecture notes, documentations and references.

Palgrave Macmillan offers sample chapters from their books.

Springer computer science reading room offers free content upon registration of details.

Lecture notes in computer science is a series which covers refereed proceedings, post-workshop books, and a few monographs. 

The World Lecture Hall gives links to pages created by academics worldwide who are using the Web to deliver course materials. Use it to find course syllabuses assignments, lecture notes, exams, class calendars, multimedia textbooks, etc.

Course Materials

MIT opencourseware: electrical engineering and computer science publishes free lecture notes, exam questions and educational resources from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the USA.

Higher Education Academy (HEA) for Information and Computer Science offers links to information resources and teaching materials for the computing and information sciences higher education (HE) community. Materials are organised into subject categories and may include course syllabuses assignments, lecture notes, exams, class calendars, multimedia textbooks, etc.

E-Learning Materials

MERLOT information technology portal is a free and open resource of learning materials designed primarily for faculty and students of higher education. It provides links to online learning materials such as sample assignments, tutorials, simulations, animations, and exercises.

FSF/UNESCO free software directory is a directory of free software that runs under free operating systems, particularly the GNU operating system and its GNU/Linux variants. Licenses are verified for every program listed in this directory.

Netskills is a training agency based at Newcastle University that provides courses on networked information to users at every level from a basic introduction to the Web to advanced courses such as authoring in HTML. The site contains sample courseware (in PDF format) and a free online introductory course.

Tutorials at W3C offers a collection of tutorials and course materials for most of the web technologies developed by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).

CSS Zen garden provides illustrative examples of how cascading style sheets (CSS) might be applied within web pages. Offers sample HTML files, as well as CSS code files, which download directly into Dreamweaver or other Web design packages. Tutorials on design techniques and bug fixes are also included.

Linux frequently asked questions with answers is a list of frequently asked questions about Linux, including information and links to network sources and resources, file systems, disks, and drives, compatibility with other operating systems, and common error messages. This FAQ is meant to be read in conjunction with the Linux Documentation Project's HOWTO series.

The secret guide to computers is a book/tutorial covering operating systems, the Internet, computer repair and maintenance, and programming languages.

Building a computer - an illustrated step by step guide is an illustrated guide on how to build a PC.

Publications

Grey literature network service offers access to reference materials pertaining to grey literature with a view to encouraging exchange and collaboration between those operating within the field. Resources include conference proceedings, including those from the annual GL conference and an archive of publications.

New Zealand digital library project: computer science technical reports offers a full-text index to several substantial collections allowing end-users to discover and then obtain the full-text documents. The computer science technical reports collection provides access to over 45,000 research papers culled from the archives of nearly 300 university and research institutions around the world.

Machine translation archive is an electronic repository (and bibliography) of articles, books, and papers in the field of machine translation and computer-based translation technology.

Informatics research report series is a collection of research reports from the School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh. Many of the items in the series are subsequently published in journals or conference proceedings.

E-Prints

CogPrints electronic archive: computer science is an electronic archive containing self-archived pre-refereed preprints and published papers that are pertinent to the study of computer science.

Computing research repository provides an online repository to which researchers from the whole field of computing can submit reports, providing users with a single place to search, browse, and download papers.

E-print network  provides access to electronic scientific or technical documents including preprints, scholarly papers, and technical communications. It is provided by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI).

OAIster is a repository of research material, based at the University of Michigan.

Institutional Repositories

MIT D-space is MIT's online institutional repository including preprints, technical reports, working papers, conference papers, images, and more.

Edinburgh research archive School of Informatics community homepage is a digital repository of research output from members of the School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh. Contained within the repository are full-text digital theses and dissertations, book chapters, journal pre-prints and peer reviewed journal reprints.

OpenDOAR offers access to repositories worldwide and provides a trial search service for the full-text of material held in open access repositories listed in the Directory.

Open Access Journals

Directory of open access journals: computer science is a section of the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) which provides access to free full-text journals in computer science.

Classic computer magazine archive makes information from old computer magazines available on the Web. Magazines include Antic, STart, Creative Computing, Hi-Res, Compute! and Compute!'s Gazette.

Data science journal provides full-text articles on the management of data and databases in science and technology.

Journal of digital information is an electronic-only peer reviewed research journal.

Bibliographic Databases accessible free of charge

ZETOC is free to use for members of JISC-sponsored UK higher and further education institutions. ZETOC provides access to the British Library's Electronic Table of Contents. It is a multi-disciplinary index that contains details of approximately 20,000 current journals and 16,000 conference proceedings published per year. Coverage is from 1993 onwards. ZETOC also provides a table of contents alerting service that emails users the contents pages of their chosen journals every time a new issue is loaded into the database.

CiteSeerX is a database allowing searching of full-text indexed computer and information science research articles and papers. Citations made by indexed documents are also listed. Other features available are lists of the most cited articles and authors.

Computer science bibliography at Universität Trier provides bibliographic information on major computer science journals and proceedings, focusing on database systems and logic programming and also other fields in computer science. The database indexes more than 725,000 articles and contains several thousand links to homepages of computer scientists.

Collection of computer science bibliographies is a collection of bibliographies of scientific literature in computer science from various sources, covering most aspects of computer science. The collection contains more than 2 millions of references (mostly to journal articles, conference papers and technical reports).

HCI bibliography is an online bibliographic database on Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) with links to recommended reading lists, developer resources, news, conferences and workshops.

Other Library Catalogues

COPAC is a union catalogue, giving free access to the merged online catalogues of many of the largest university research libraries in the UK and Ireland plus the British Library. It contains records of over 31 million library resources.

British Library catalogues on the web The British Library is the national library of the UK and receives a copy of every publication produced in the UK and Ireland. Their catalogues list over 150 million items held in the collections - most of which can be ordered by inter-library loan from your local library.

Other libraries' web catalogues A list of other library catalogues on the Internet, including the national libraries of other countries.

SALSER is a web service, which allows you to find out whether a serial publication (e.g. a journal or magazine) is held by any of the major Scottish academic and research libraries. The service includes all Scottish university libraries, the National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh City Libraries, the Mitchell Library in Glasgow, and the Union Lists of the Edinburgh Libraries Federation and the Glasgow Higher Education Institutions.

SUNCAT is a free tool to help researchers and librarians locate serials held in the UK.

Internet Search Tools

Scirus is a science-specific search engine produced by Elsevier Science. It targets sites such as university websites and author home pages and filters out non-scientific sites. It also includes the SciTopics service which provides research summaries by experts.

Organisations

British Computer Society (BCS) is the qualifying body for Chartered IT Professionals (CITP). They are also an international awarding body for a wide range of qualifications for both users of IT and IT specialists.

National Computing Centre (NCC) is a corporate membership body in the UK IT sector. NCC champions the effective deployment of IT to maximise the competitiveness of its members' business, and serves the corporate, vendor and government communities.

UK Computing Research Committee (UKCRC) aims to promote the vitality, quality and impact of computing research in the UK. Its members are internationally leading computer researchers drawn from both academia and industry. UKCRC is an Expert Panel of the British Computer Society, the Council of Professors and Heads of Computing and the Institution of Engineering and Technology.

Society for the Study of Artificial Intelligence and Simulation of Behaviour is a British academic society for artificial intelligence.

Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) is an educational and scientific computing society. ACM provides a Digital Library and serves its members and the computing profession with publications, conferences, and career resources.

Computing Research Association (CRA) is an association of more than 200 North American academic departments of computer science, computer engineering, and related fields; laboratories and centres in industry, government, and academia engaging in basic computing research; and affiliated professional societies.

IEEE Computer Society (IEEE CS) is an organisation of computing professionals. Founded in 1946, and the largest of the 39 societies of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), the CS is dedicated to advancing the theory and application of computer and information-processing technology.

World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is an international consortium which develops interoperable technologies and Web standards (specifications, protocols, guidelines, software, and tools) to lead the World Wide Web to its full potential.

Commercial Organisations

DeveloperWorks is an IBM's technical resource for software developers and IT professionals, providing an online collection of tutorials, sample code, standards, and other resources provided by experts at IBM to assist software developers using open standards.

Apple developer connection provides user guides, documentation and tutorials on developing applications for the Mac OS X, iPhone and iPod.

Microsoft developer network (MSDN) pulls together content and resources around specific Microsoft products and technologies, including code samples, community sites, technical articles and documentation, and upcoming events.

Sun developer network (SDN) provides articles, code samples, tutorials, and technical information covering all aspects of the Java products and technologies including downloads, FAQs, specifications, and white papers from its official home page by Sun Microsystems, Inc.

Conferences

Academic conferences international facilitates academic conferences on a wide range of subjects including eLearning, e-government, information security, and IT evaluation, details of which are provided. There are links to information about each conference as well as tables of contents of conference proceedings and textbooks.

IEEE conferences and meetings allows you to search for IEEE meetings on specific topics or in specific locations around the world.

Social Media

Blogs

Guardian technology blog is a blog by the Guardian News and Media Limited focusing on computers, gaming and Internet technologies.

Mitchell's blog is the weblog of Mitchell Baker, the Chairman of the Mozilla Foundation. Blog posts are archived monthly and can also be found under the categories Mozilla, trapeze (personal life), and uncategorised.

Wikis

DeveloperWorks wikis is a collection of wikis on topics of interest to developers.

Message boards

DeveloperWorks community is a collection of forums provided by the IBM developerWorks.

Social Networks

Elgg is an open source social networking platform that offers blogging, networking, community, collecting of news using feeds aggregation and file sharing features. Documentation available on the site includes troubleshooting guides, developer resources and tutorials.

Video sharing sites

Many academic institutions operate a channel on YouTube, e.g.:

YouTube: The University of California, Berkeley: the structure and interpretation of computer science offers this playlist of video lectures for the course "The Structure and Interpretation of Computer Science".

Virtual Worlds

OpenSimulator is a 3D Application Server. It can be used to create a virtual world which can be accessed through a variety of clients, on multiple protocols. The website includes user and developer documentation, FAQs, support forums, news, and screenshots.

Some organisations have a location in Second Life, e.g.:

Informatics at Edinburgh University: project SL

Podcasts

IEEE Computer Society podcasts offers a listing of podcasts and video blogs.

MIT podcasts offers a biweekly audio digest of top MIT news.

DeveloperWorks podcasts is a collection of interviews and discussions on topics vital to software developers provided by IBM developerWorks.

Email discussion lists

JISCmail is the national academic mailing service for the UK. Check its directories for relevant lists. It is possible to search descriptions of lists and archived messages before you decide to sign up.

News & Media

BBC news: technology section provides technology and IT news stories.

CNET news provides the latest technology news headlines and stories.

Computing magazine provides news stories and articles about information and communication technologies (ICTs). Research reports, market intelligence, case studies, podcasts, video content, and comment from industry analysts are included.

Alertbox: current issues in web usability is a bi-weekly column by Jakob Nielsen on Web related issues in general and Web usability in particular.

UK Future TV is an Internet TV channel that gives access to videos which examine in depth the work of academics, researchers, entrepreneurs and innovators across the fields of health, education, environment, society, science and technology.

Slashdot is a news forum for computer and IT related news and opinion. Topical news items are posted, along with user comments to promote discussion and exchange of ideas on specific topics.