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University of Maryland Mathematics Library Information

You are probably aware that mathematics books and journals are housed in the Engineering and Physical Sciences Library (EPSL), located in the Mathematics Building. The library reference staff are able and eager to serve you. The head librarian for EPSL, as well as the main acquisitions librarian for mathematics, is Zdravkovska, Nevenka (email: nevenka@umd.edu, phone: 5-9144). On issues of mathematics book and journal acquisitions, another librarian you can talk to is Jim Miller (email: jmiller2@umd.edu phone: 5-9152). The library maintains a listing of all mathematics and statistics journals currently received by the EPSL library.

Extra Library Services:

Course Reserves:

It is possible to put books on reserve for courses. Effective fall 1998, reserves for 100- and 200-level courses are handled by the Reserve Desk in the front, south wing of the second floor of McKeldin Library, phone: 4-5678 (even if the materials involved are normally shelved in EPSL). Reserves for 400-level and graduate-level courses in MATH, MAPL, and STAT are normally handled at the EPSL Circulation Desk, phone: 5-9140.

Interlibrary Loan:

If you need a book or journal that the library does not have, it is possible to get it by Interlibrary Loan. For books this usually takes about 2 weeks; for individual journal articles, it may be possible to do everything electronically and get the article within days as a PDF file by "Desktop Delivery". Go to this www site to order directly on the Web.

Electronic Reference Services:

Many library services are now available electronically through the world-wide www. The university's catalogue may be accessed here, or you can go to the libraries home page for a variety of reference services.

Most publishers and journals these days have world-wide www home pages. In many cases, you can browse publisher's catalogues and the tables of contents of recent journal issues. In some cases, the full text of the journal is also available (sometimes only by subscription). We have electronic subscriptions to a few conventional journals, such as Transactions of the AMS, and back issues of some journals (including the Transactions and Annals of Mathematics) are also available through JSTOR. There are also many fully electronic mathematics and science journals. For more information on electronic journals and reference services, see the Electronic Journals Page.

Last but not least, the AMS has many reference services available through its home page: http://www.ams.org. Particularly useful are the CML search feature (to find addresses, phone numbers, and email addresses of mathematicians), the on-line Mathematics Subject Classification Scheme (to find the correct classification numbers for research papers), and MathSciNet, the on-line version of Math Reviews. The department has a subscription to the latter valid on all mathnet machines. MathSciNet is very handy for checking references, looking up reviews, and doing literature searches.

The Math Serials Project:

Starting in January, 1997, the library canceled a large number of its mathematics journal subscriptions, and in exchange, the savings are being used to subsidize document delivery for math faculty. This is a pilot project, designed to see if it is possible to break the cycle of ever-increasing journal subscriptions prices in a "technologically advanced" department. It was possible until recently for math faculty to order journal articles not in the EPSL library through a service called UnCover. Now UnCover has been bought out by Ingenta and it is possible to use Ingenta for searching and document delivery for some items. The library will subsidize up to $35 of the cost for journal articles the library doesn't own for faculty. To get started, go to the Ingenta gateway page. For other items not available this way, please use Interlibrary Loan as described above.