Hi! My name is Nando Ochoa. I am a Senior Lecturer at The University of Manchester, UK and also serving as Member-At-Large on the PES Governing Board (among other PES volunteering positions). I was appointed in 2013 primarily to provide leadership to one of the most exciting membership benefits from PES: Resource Center. More and more PES members are using this fantastic database which is also becoming better and better. So, I would like to use this opportunity to give you an update.

What is Resource Center?

For those of you that have not yet heard of Resource Center, in essence it is a web-based database that showcases media such as videos and presentation slides from our PES-sponsored conferences around the world as well as technical reports and tutorials produced by our Society’s Technical Committees. All this content is freely available to PES members.

Resource Center Today

PES launched Resource Center (resourcecenter.ieee-pes.org) in late 2013 with over 500 items incorporating presentation slides and videos. Today there are more than 1,800 items available including content from the IEEE PES General Meeting 2015. To date Resource Center has had more than 26,000 visitors from 166 countries – a strong indication of the interest shown by professionals, academics, and students worldwide. Indeed, the uniqueness of this fantastic database will also help PES recruiting more members.

Media Content

Resource Center is a database and as such the content has to be organized. Content related to conferences are primarily videos and/or presentation slides of keynote speakers, plenary sessions and panel sessions. We have set up a process to collect the content from most PES conferences around the world including the General Meeting, T&D, Innovative Smart Grid Technologies (ISGT) series, PowerTech, etc.

Technical Reports and Tutorials

The technical reports and tutorials, on the other hand, follow a different process. Given that this content is produced by volunteers in Technical Sub-Committees, Working Groups or Task Forces, it needs first to be approved by the corresponding Technical Committee and then submitted to our Society’s Technical Council. Once this is done, the corresponding content is then made available on Resource Center. We encourage all volunteers working on reports and tutorials to liaise with their Technical Committees to ensure the wider dissemination of their outputs via Resource Center.

“Resource Center 2.0” is Around the Corner

Resource Center is set to become a prime database for Power & Energy media and technical content. To achieve this, we are not only striving to significantly enrich its content but we have also been busy creating a new better platform. The beta version of the new Resource Center is now live: stagingpes.ieee-pes.org. Please feel free to send us comments or suggestions. The full transition to the new platform is expected to be completed by early 2016. This will not only provide a better user experience but, as an e-commerce platform, will also allow non-PES members (individuals and/or institutions) to have pay-for access to the content they are interested in. This can eventually become another revenue stream for PES – which will in turn bring further benefits to us, PES members. Indeed, the huge potential of this new Resource Center has been recognised by other IEEE Societies who are now joining efforts to have similar initiatives.

Make the most of Resource Center!

Luis(Nando) Ochoa
Member-At-Large