The Australasian Virtual Engineering Library (AVEL)

The Australasian Virtual Engineering Library (AVEL)

A consortium of universities and professional groups has launched an innovative new website designed to revolutionise access to high quality IT and engineering information.

The Australasian Virtual Engineering Library (AVEL) is a gateway or portal designed to help engineers and information technology professionals save time and find relevant information on the web quickly. It provides free access to over 2,000 quality Australasian information sources.

Associate Professor David Radcliffe from the Mechanical Engineering Department of The University of Queensland is the leader of the group that has created the virtual library.

'AVEL, with its sophisticated web-based services, will help Australian engineers and IT professionals achieve competitive intelligence,' he said.

'AVEL is a dynamic virtual research space with its integrated structure, incorporating a database of quality and reliable engineering and IT resources, list of conferences in the Australasian region, employment listings, access to full-text theses, online bookshop for books on engineering and IT and latest Web resources in relevant fields.'

'You can search or browse AVEL. For example, you can look up manufacturing or software engineering or search for a conference on software security and access resources which have been hand-picked, indexed and updated by experts,' Professor Radcliffe said.

AVEL is a collaborative initiative involving the Universities of Queensland, New South Wales, Melbourne and Monash, Queensland University of Technology, the Centre for Mining Technology and Equipment (CMTE), the CRC for Enterprise Distributed Systems Technology and the Institution of Engineers, Australia . It is funded by a grant from the Australian Research Council (ARC) with financial and in-kind contributions from the partner organizations.

AVEL is at: http://avel.edu.au/

Media contact: Gulcin Cribb, Manager, Dorothy Hill Physical Sciences and Engineering Library, UQ, telephone 07 3365 3828 or email us at: communications@mailbox.uq.edu.au