SPIE Digital Library Moves To Enhanced New Website

Society publisher moves world’s largest optics and photonics library to new site with improved, agile functionality

Scholarly publisher SPIE, the international society for optics and photonics, has announced the move of the SPIE Digital Library (www.spiedigitallibrary.org) on 15 August to a new and substantially enhanced website.

Developed internally by SPIE to create an improved user experience and incorporate a number of enhancements and new features, the website housing and distributing SPIE's conference proceedings, journals, and eBooks has been completely redesigned and re-engineered.

The development and launch of the new SPIE Digital Library (SDL) website is "the culmination of a very exciting multiyear project undertaken to bring the means for disseminating timely information to the scientific and industrial community within SPIE's full control. This enables the Society to be more responsive, more innovative, and more agile," noted SPIE CEO Eugene Arthurs. "We see this as a major step forward that demonstrates SPIE's long-term commitment to meeting the needs of the optics and photonics community."

The new in-house website features an entirely redesigned user interface inspired by response to input received from researchers and authors over several rounds of usability studies and incorporating best website design practices.

The new site also incorporates a number of feature enhancements.

A significant percentage of oral presentations from SPIE conferences are now being recorded and published. These presentations are easier to find and view on the new site. More than 9,000 conference presentations are currently available, including a number of plenary and keynote talks, many of which are open access.

New personalization features include a "Save for Later" tool that enables users to save and manage citations in a personal library with customizable folders.

Other personalization tools include easily managed new content and search email alerts, and tools to export citations and abstracts to commonly used bibliographic software programs.

Full-text HTML for papers published in SPIE journals dates back to 2001. With the new website, proceedings papers dating back to 2014 display full-text HTML in addition to downloadable PDFs. All SPIE Field Guides and Spotlights eBooks are also now available in HTML as well as PDF formats.

An expanded optics and photonics taxonomy of more than 4,000 terms powers related content recommendations and improved search to return the most relevant results. Each paper includes keywords ranked by frequency of occurrence along with related content recommendations based on keyword equivalence. Search results can also be refined using taxonomic relationships.

Launched in 2003, the SDL now includes more than 460,000 journal and proceedings articles as well as more than 300 eBooks. Additional older publications have been added to the database, back through the first Proceedings of SPIE published in 1963 and including 46 Critical Reviews volumes with invited review papers published from 1990 to 2002.

"The launch of the new Digital Library platform is hugely important to SPIE's mission and future service to the community," said SPIE President Glenn Boreman. "It is the vehicle through which SPIE is able to meet our mission to disseminate knowledge to the global community of engineers, scientists, and students interested in contributing to and learning about the important impacts and possibilities of optics and photonics in today's world."

About SPIE
SPIE is the international society for optics and photonics, an educational not-for-profit organization founded in 1955 to advance light-based science, engineering, and technology. The Society serves nearly 264,000 constituents from approximately 166 countries, offering conferences and their published proceedings, continuing education, books, journals, and the SPIE Digital Library. In 2016, SPIE provided $4M in support of education and outreach programs. For more information, visit www.spie.org.