Librarian Highlight: Danianne Mizzy, Engineering Librarian

Posted on by Jen

Mizzy Pic with kids

Librarian: Danianne Mizzy (in the middle!)

Title: Engineering Librarian

Subject specialties: Engineering, Engineering Education, Patents, Technical Reports

Contact info: dmizzy@columbia.edu; 212.854.9087; 422 Mudd Bldg.

Library: Engineering Library

@ Columbia Libraries since: 2010

Education Info: AB Brown University (International Relations); MFA Yale School of Drama (Lighting Design – ask me about my Broadway show); MLS University of Pittsburgh

About me:  “It’s great to be back in NYC, where I was born and raised. I am very happy to be working with Engineering students and faculty again after a detour into special collections librarianship. Bring on the materials properties questions! ”

What’s new at my library:

  1. Extended hours and more electrical outlets. The students are studying away in the wee hours and appreciate the additional places to plug in their laptops. 
  2. Great feedback from a survey of science and engineering students – thanks to everyone who filled it out. This feedback will be used to guide collections and service decisions for both Engineering and the new Integrated Science Library.
  3. Me! I love to help with research, so please contact me.

Personal favorite:  Scopus – it includes conference literature and patents, and is more comprehensive for engineers than Web of Science.

Recommended resources:

  • Derwent Innovations Index – This is the premier patents discovery tool. International in scope, with disambiguation of entities (use the assignee code UYCO to see what Columbia has patented) and patent families. Titles and abstracts are rewritten to improve retrieval and the full-text is a click away. It is estimated that 70-80% of the technical information contained in patents is never published anywhere else.

  • Compendex and INSPEC – Comprehensive citation coverage of the journal and conference literature of engineering will be found in Compendex and of computer science, electrical engineering and physics in INSPEC. They can be searched simultaneously because they share the Engineering Village platform.

  • Ebook Collections – Find data in handbook collections like Knovel and Referex, pithy summaries of the current state of research in Annual Reviews, and help for your computer woes in the Safari Tech Books Collection.

  • Library Tools & Widgets – Use these widgets and plug-ins to get to the good stuff, fast – like the Columbia version of GoogleScholar with linking to full-text enabled (via the elink).