APPLICATIONS

Online Computing and IT Publications Provide Rich Resources for Computing Professionals: ACM (the Association for Computing Machinery) passed a major milestone in February, when the number of works represented in ACM’s vast digital collection of published computing literature passed the 1,000,000 mark. ACM’s digital collection includes the Digital Library (DL), which contains the full-text of everything ACM has published in its 60 years, and the Guide to Computing Literature, a bibliographic database of the key publications across the entire computing field. ACM’s Digital Library and Guide are used by thousands of computing professionals from both industry and academia. The Digital Library and Guide can be found at its Web site. “The ACM Digital Library and the Guide bibliographic database are valuable tools offering convenient access in one place to the published works in the computing field,” said John White, Chief Executive Officer of ACM. “For people who design, develop and manage information systems, the DL and Guide provide easy entry into the massive amounts of scientific and technical information that drive innovation.” The one millionth document in the Guide was the cover story “Spam and the Ongoing Battle for the Inbox,” in the February 2007 issue of Communications of the ACM, the organization’s flagship publication covering existing and emerging technologies. Dr. White noted that use of ACM’s DL and Guide has increased considerably in the last five years, as the computing field has grown. “The growth in ACM’s digital collection reflects the growth and expansion of the computing field. With one million entries, ACM’s DL really is the definitive digital collection for computing,” he said. The number and availability of resources in ACM’s online DL and Guide have accelerated in the last decade. This growth is due in part to extended applications of computing technology to more fields – from entertainment to biotechnology, from weather forecasting to transportation. The content in ACM’s DL and Guide reflect the core technologies that underlie all of these applications. The Guide provides links from its bibliographic records to original source material. It covers core works in computing in all genres, including journals, proceedings, books, technical reports, dissertations, and requests for comment. Currently, the Guide includes bibliographic entries for more than more than 370,000 journal articles; nearly 135,000 books; some 55,000 theses; almost 400,000 proceedings papers from conferences; and over 40,000 reports and other resources. The Guide increases by 50,000 items per year. More information about access and subscriptions to the ACM Digital Library and Guide is at its Web site .