Individual Article:
Proceedings of the SPIE available online back to 1998
In 1964, the Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers published a volume of seminar proceedings, and continued to publish one or two volumes of this series for several more years. But the explosion of research in lasers and other optical instrumentation created enormous growth in the publication of conference proceedings by the society, which is now called the International Society of Optical Engineering (SPIE). Currently, well over 300 conference proceedings are published each year by SPIE, covering topics as diverse as nanotechnology, atmospheric science, production engineering, communications and signal processing, medical imaging, quality control, and even chemistry and biology. Northwestern University Library is one of the few academic institutions to maintain a complete subscription to the SPIE proceedings, recognizing the value of this coverage to University researchers.
SPIE has recently launched a new electronic product, the SPIE Digital Library, which the Library has acquired in place of the print subscription. Northwestern is one of the first academic institutions to subscribe to the SPIE Digital Library, which includes full-text of both the proceedings and all four SPIE journals back to 1998 (Optical Engineering; Journal of Biomedical Optics; Journal of Electronic Imaging; Journal of Microlithography, Microfabrication, and Microsystems). The SPIE Digital Library, which currently contains more than 90,000 technical papers, will gain an additional 200,000 papers when coverage is extended back to 1990, which is planned for the near future. The database is also growing by about 15,000 new research papers each year. The searchable SPIE Digital Library is on the Web at http://spiedl.org/.
Bob Michaelson