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He remembers spending
afternoons in the library using the
heavy printed volumes of the “Science
Citation Index” (SCI) and “Physical
Abstracts”. Whilst it isn’t actually
that long ago since printed indexes to
the world’s research literature were
heavily used in libraries – the changes
that have taken place in the last ten
years in terms of electronic scholarly
publishing and the internet have been
significant. The Library took advantage
of these developments and subscribed to
key research indexing and abstracting
databases and where possible full-text
journal collections. Now researchers
access the SCI via the “Web of
Knowledge” directly from their desktop.
Enda’s main area of research now is in
the study of wide bandgap semiconductor
materials such as zinc oxide (ZnO) which
can be tuned to emit light in the deep
blue and ultra-violet regions of the
spectrum and may be applied to the
development of new methods of optical
data storage and highly energy efficient
solid state lighting among other
outcomes. In particular his research
group concentrates on growing so-called
“nanostructures”, i.e. controlling the
location and size of very small
structures of the material (e.g. ZnO
nanorods, little columns of ZnO about
80nm in diameter, a thousand times
smaller than the width of a single hair)
to achieve a particular function. The
figure (at bottom
of page)
shows an example of such a structure.
Given the vast increase in access to
electronic journal collections, do you
ever visit the library to view print
journals?
Yes, whilst I miss the regular
afternoons spent in the Library as a PhD
student, I now visit the library about
once a month to browse the print
journals. I actually find this really
productive in terms of locating really
useful articles I probably wouldn’t come
across otherwise.
Now that we have actually more
e-journals than print journals and
databases such as INSPEC and SCI to help
retrieve relevant articles, do you find
your use of the journal literature has
increased?
Yes definitely, I use INSPEC and SCI
(via Web of Knowledge) a great deal and
find that more and more of the articles
I find are available electronically from
the Library. Of course, to a large
extent this has led to “printing out the
paper” rather than actually always
“reading the paper”. I now tend to read
the abstracts and conclusions of a large
number of papers. Of particular
importance to my research work is the
increased electronic access to
professional society journal collections
(such as IOP, PROLA, APS, AIP).
What other resources do you use in the
course of your research (books,
pre-prints etc)?
I would regularly recommend key titles
from the book collection to my
postgraduate and post-doctoral students.
In terms of pre-print services, I’m
certainly familiar with them,
but find that
in my specific area of research that
pre-print archives are not as important
or widely consulted as for example in particle
physics. I do however think that
an institutional repository of staff
pre-prints can play a significant role
in dissemination and impact of our
research output.
What in your opinion does the library do
well and should continue doing?
Communication between the Library and
the school is excellent – we share a
similar vision for the development of,
and interactions with, the library. This
is greatly supported by the fact that we
have that dedicated point of contact
through our Subject Librarian. In fact,
overall I find Library staff a pleasure
to deal with.
The inter-library loan service continues
to be important in terms of accessing
older material and it’s great that
material can be delivered so much
quicker than in the past.
ALCID is also a great service for the
research community. I use it regularly
to gain access to journal collections in
other Dublin university libraries. I
also encourage my post-graduate students
to avail of this service.
What can we do better?
If money was available, I would
definitely like to see increased access
to electronic journal backfiles.
Backfile access is one of the areas
where newer universities are naturally
disadvantaged. The increasing
availability of backfile electronic
access can level the playing field in
this regard. Otherwise, just keep doing
what you are doing.
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