Hi! My name is Luis (Nando) Ochoa. I am a Senior Lecturer at The University of Manchester, UK and also serving as a Member-At-Large on the PES Governing Board (among other PES volunteering positions). I was appointed last year primarily to provide leadership to one of the most exciting membership benefits from PES: Resource Center. So, with this article I would like to raise awareness of this fantastic database available to all PES members and also to let you know a bit of its history, some statistics, the ‘behind the scenes’ work, and the plans we have for the future.

What is Resource Center?

In essence, Resource Center is a web-based database that showcases media such as videos and presentation slides from PES-sponsored conferences (e.g., General Meetings, Innovative Smart Grid Technologies (ISGT), Transmission and Distribution, etc.) as well as technical reports and tutorials produced by our Society’s Technical Committees, Working Groups, Task Forces, etc. All this content is freely available to PES members.

How it started?

The idea of such a database started around 5 years ago. It was initially envisioned as an e-commerce platform. This is why you may see the URL aliases pes-store.org and pes-shop.org referring to Resource Center. At the time, the database only had a bit more than 100 items including tutorials and technical reports – no presentation slides or videos were available.

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 1,500 items available including content from the 2014 PES General Meeting. To date Resource Center has had more than 10,500 visitors from 137 countries – a strong indication of the interest shown by professionals, students and academics around the world. Indeed, the uniqueness of this fantastic database will also help PES recruit members.

Behind the Scenes

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 for North American-based conferences such as the General Meeting, Transmission and Distribution, and the Innovative Smart Grid Technologies (ISGT). We are extending this process to other conferences around the world –examples of this are the content from T&D Latin America 2012 and ISGT Asia 2014 conferences already available.

Technical reports and tutorials, on the other hand, follow a different process. Given that this content is produced by Technical Committees, Working Groups or Task Forces, it needs first to be approved by our Society’s Technical Council. Once this is done, the corresponding content can be made available on Resource Center.

Resource Center in the Future

We believe that Resource Center will become a prime database for Power & Energy media and technical content. To achieve this we will strive to significantly enrich it with content from most PES conferences around the world as well as by timely incorporating reports and tutorials produced by our Technical Committees. We are also in the process of improving the search functionality of the database that is essential for an effective user experience. Finally, we hope to make the e-commerce platform a reality to 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, the PES members.

Enjoy the Resource Center!