Featured Resource: ACM Digital Library
Posted on Thu, Jul 07, 2011
The Association for Computing Machinery is one of the largest communities of computing professionals in the world. One of the societies’ goals is to use their Digital Library to provide important resources to those interested in the field. The database is a compilation of dozens of different journals, magazines, and conference proceedings. The library also has a comprehensive list of all the journals it draws from, with links to a subscription page for each one.
Directly Involved With its Sources
One of the ways this digital library stands out is that in addition to simply compiling articles from a number of different places, there are over 40 publications that ACM has a direct hand in producing. This means that rather than just gathering, ACM can easily integrate many of the sources straight into their database. This allows almost immediate access to newly-published articles through the database. The same applies to the conference proceedings. These can often be hard to find online, but ACM makes it simple by sponsoring over 150 conferences a year and swiftly publishing any conference talks.
A Leader in Computer Science Organization
One of the largest advantages the ACM DL has over other similar engines is its search technique. While most databases use operators to help the researching process, few can boast ACM’s unique Computing Classification System, or CSS. The CSS was first developed in 1964, and has been revised six times since then. The system sorts computer science subjects into multiple “levels”, meaning that there are many different branches of this organizational tree. Researching using CSS allows the searcher to customize their results for their preferred sections of computer science.
In Depth Research Statistics
ACM is also working on creating “Institutional Profile Pages”. These pages will compile the publication history of all of the most prolific institutions in the library.
It will make it easier to find the popular and most downloaded files, as well as making it easier to see if a certain institution has a particularly strong or prolific interest in a relevant field. Finally, this feature contains plenty of data, or “bibliometrics”. These statistics help researchers find most cited works, what years authors from this institution were most prolific in their publishing, and many other useful pieces of information. The project shows ACM’s dedication to making their library as informative as possible, as these stats will eventually be attached to every document in the database.
Non-ACM members can search abstracts and references for free. To access full journal texts, researchers can buy individual articles, or pay for an all-inclusive subscription to read everything in the database.
For additional search tools, visit Article One’s Resources & Tools page.