Effective Use of
Internet Resources for
Teaching, Learning and Research
By Fred O’Bryant
Applied Sciences Librarian
The University of Virginia
Assembled for the Best Practices in Engineering Education Workshop Held
at the American Society for Engineering Education—Southeast Section
Annual Conference
The University of Alabama
Tuscaloosa, Alabama
April 2, 2006
The current version of this document will be available from the URL shown below.
Please send comments, suggestions and questions to:
Fred O’Bryant
Applied Sciences Librarian
The Charles L. Brown Science and Engineering Library
P. O. Box 400124
The University of Virginia
Charlottesville, Virginia 22904-4124
E-Mail: jfo@virginia.edu
Document Address: http://www.people.virginia.edu/~jfo/PPTS/index.html
2
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercialShareAlike 2.5 License. To view a copy of this license, visit
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.5/ or send a letter to Creative Commons,
543 Howard Street, 5th Floor, San Francisco, California, 94105, USA.
© 2006, Fred O’Bryant
3
Table of Contents
Introduction
5
Planning Your Research
6
Search Strategy Planner
9
Finding Journal Articles
14
Finding Books
24
Reference Books
30
Web Searching
32
Government Information
40
Patents, Trademarks and Copyright
44
Standards
49
Technical Reports and Preprints
52
Military Information
55
Teaching Aids, Demonstrations and Images
58
The Engineer and Society: Ethics, Economics and Sociology
62
Keeping Current
68
A Knowledge Tool
76
List of Included Resources
81
4
Introduction
Thank you for attending this ASEE-SE conference workshop and for reading this
workbook and reference! It is my sincere hope that you will find the material included
here useful and helpful to you as you plan and teach future classes of your own or as you
pursue your own study and research, either individually or as part of a group.
This book does not pretend to be all-inclusive. No book can possibly cover everything
there is to know about the resources available via the Internet. I can only hope to offer
you some basic information that will point out some of the most useful—and sometimes
essential—material available to you and how you might use it in your own academic
setting. My goal is to suggest fruitful avenues of inquiry—how far you choose to go
along any one of those avenues is largely up to you.
Each of you has available at your home institution an absolutely essential resource that
you should never hesitate to take advantage of: your library and your librarians. The
librarians working at your college or university are highly trained, knowledgeable,
dedicated, service-oriented individuals who will be happy to help you find the
information you and your students need and to show you how to make the best use of the
many information gathering tools available to you. Here in this workbook I can perhaps
show you the way—your local librarians can guide you along it however far the path may
lead. I urge you to work with your library colleagues in as many ways as you can. You
won’t regret it!
As I said, this workbook is not comprehensive. While I’ve tried to include a variety of
useful and interesting tools and resources, there are many others just as good that I lacked
time and space to include. If you know of a resource that you think would be good to
include in future workshops of this type, I would be happy to hear from you what they
are. And if there are mistakes of either commission or omission included here, I take full
responsibility for them and would appreciate your pointing them out as well.
You may utilize this workbook in your own classes and teaching as you feel best suits
your needs within the parameters of the Creative Commons license appearing on page 3
above.
Thank you and happy searching!
Fred O’Bryant
Applied Sciences Librarian
The Charles L. Brown Science and Engineering Library
The University of Virginia
Charlottesville, VA
E-Mail: obryant@virginia.edu
5
Plans get you into things, but you got to work your way out.
- Will Rogers
Planning Your Research
You would never build a car or design a computer chip without first
having a plan. Yet lots of people sit down to do online research without any
advance thought whatsoever—and so they waste a lot of time and energy!
Don’t be like those folks! Have a plan, know what it is you’re looking for,
and where you’re likely to find it. Think before you type! Here are some
key planning skills that will save you time and improve your results:
 Be clear in your mind exactly what it is you are looking for
 Determine whether you want citations to material—or actual facts and
data
 Identify likely key search terms before sitting down at the computer
 Note the names of known key authors who have written on your topic
 Think of synonyms and related terms for your key search terms
 Remember to search for both singular and plural forms
6
 Remember that British English and American English may use
different terms for the same concept (e.g. petrol and gasoline; hood
and bonnet) so you will need to search for all of them
 Remember that British and American spellings for the same term also
may differ (e.g. aluminum and aluminium; center and centre)
Once you’ve developed your list of search terms, then you can turn to your
computer or come to the library to do your research. Here are some
additional key things that will save you time and improve your results:
 Have a systematic plan of attack for which databases to search and in
what order (see worksheet below)
 Start with a broad, general database and then move to more specific
databases
 Also start your searching generally – don’t be too specific too soon
 In most databases, use individual terms and/or short phrases
 Based on the results of your term searches, go back and combine
terms and phrases to narrow your search results to exactly what you
want
 Search for known authors and examine the abstracts and keywords
assigned to their articles in order to discover additional search terms
 If the database(s) you are using support citation searching, identify
key papers on your topic and follow their reference trails to discover
additional papers of interest
 If you are having any difficulties, consult with your local librarian as
soon as possible
The remainder of this workbook will outline many specific sources of
information and give some explicit tips and hints for using them. The
Search Strategy Planner below gives you a tool that you can use or modify
for students in your classes that will help organize your information
gathering activities. This tool will insure that your searches are conducted in
7
a logical and thorough manner, thus hopefully providing you with both highquality results and comprehensive coverage of resources.
8
Search Strategy Planner
This planner will help guide you through the process of deciding how and
where to search for information on your topic. It is organized along the lines
of the remaining chapters of this workbook, and is meant to suggest
possibilities and provide structure—it is not necessarily complete. You can
adapt it to suit your local situation or the needs of a particular class. The key
point is to help you be organized in your approach to seeking the
information you need and thus more efficient. You should, however, always
seek assistance from your local librarians or other knowledgeable
individuals about specific resources and search strategies, if you need to.
1) What is the specific topic of my search?
2) What key words (and their synonyms) describe my topic?
3) What principal authors have written on my topic?
4) Is my question purely technical or does it also involve social, ethical
and/or economic issues?
5) Do I need highly technical information, moderately technical information
or just general information?
9
6) Which of these databases are likely to contain information on my topic?
(Check as many as may apply—and remember there may be others not listed here
that would also be useful. Consult your local librarian.)
___ Aerospace and High Technology Database
___ Inspec
___ BioEngineering Abstracts
___ Lexis-Nexis
___ Civil Engineering Abstracts
___ MathSciNet
___ Computer and Information Systems Abstracts
___ Mechanical &Transportation Engr Abstracts
___ Ei Compendex
___ Medline/Pubmed
___ Environmental Engineering Abstracts
___ Metadex
___ Georef
___ Scifinder Scholar
___ IEEE Xplore
___ Scopus
___ InfoTrac OneFile
___ TRIS
___ INIS Database
___ Web of Science
7) Is there information on the Internet about my topic? If so, which Web
search engine(s) or directory will likely list it?
(Check as many as may apply—and remember there may be others not listed here
that would also be useful. Consult your local librarian.)
___ Athenus
___ Google
___ BUBL
___ Librarians Index to the Internet
___ EEVL
___ Scirus
___ Globalspec
___ Yahoo!
8) Is there information in books (either online or printed) that will be of use
in answering my question? If so, where should I search for them?
___ In my local library catalog
___ In another library’s catalog
___ In a global book database (e.g. OCLC, RLG)
___ In an online book dealer’s catalog
___ Others (Specify)
10
9) Is there information in reference books (either online or printed) that will
be of use in answering my question? If so, what are they?
___ ENGnetBASE
___ Knovel Interactive Library
___ Others (Specify)
10) Is there government-produced information available on my topic?
Where should I look for this information?
___ Firstgov
___ Government Documents Section of my library
___ Science.gov
___ Specific Agencies (List)
11) Are there any engineering or product standards I need to consult in
order to answer my question?
___ ASTM (American Society for Testing and Materials)
___ IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers)
___ NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology)
___ NSSN (originally National Standards Systems Network)
___ WSSN (World Standards Services Network)
___ Others (Specify)
12) Are there technical reports available on my topic? If so, where should I
look for them?
___ arXiv.org
___ NCSTRL (Networked Computer Science Technical Reference Library)
___ NTIS (National Technical Information Service)
___ NTRS (NASA Technical Reports Server)
___ Others (Specify)
13) Do I need to search for patents and/or trademarks relating to my topic?
If so, where should I look?
___ esp@cenet Databases (European Patent Office)
___ USPTO Database (U.S. Patent and Trademarks Office)
___ Others (Specify)
11
14) Is there military-related information about my topic? If so, where
should I search for this information?
___ DefenseLINK
___ Firstgov
___ NTIS (National Technical Information Service)
___ SearchMil
___ Others (Specify)
15) Are there departments or persons outside of my science/engineering
library but still within the larger institutional library system that may have
information about my topic?
___ Architecture School Library (Civil Engineering, Planning,
Environmental)
___ Business School Library (Company Info, Marketing, Patenting,
IT)
___ Government Documents Library (Maps, Statistical Data, GIS)
___ Law School Library (Legal Issues, Patent Law, Forensics)
___ Medical School Library (Biomedical Engineering)
___ Others (Specify)
16) Are there persons or groups outside my department but within my
university who may be able to provide information on my topic?
___ Research Groups in Other Departments
___ Local Institutes
___ Faculty/Graduate Students Doing Related Research
___ Facilities Staff
___ Others (Specify)
12
17) Are there persons or groups outside of my university who may be able
to provide information on my topic?
___ Professional Societies
___ Learned Societies
___ Government Officials
___ Practicing Engineers
___ Companies and Industries
___ Specialized Libraries
___ Others (Specify)
18) And if I still have questions, I should always…
ASK MY LIBRARIAN!
Additional Notes:
13
Finding Journal Articles
No matter what you’re searching for,
you’ll always find it in the last place you look!
So what’s the point?
It’s simply that knowing the best place or
places to look for information will save you valuable time. If you have to
look through ten different indexes to find what you need, wouldn’t it have
been better to start with the tenth one in the first place? Or at least the eighth
or ninth one!
So the key question is: What is the best place to search? Librarians get this
question a lot—and the answer, alas, usually is “It depends.” Among other
things it depends on the subject of your inquiry, what type of information
you’re looking for, and the time span you’re interested in.
If you’re at a loss to decide which are the best databases for your particular
research topic, call your local reference librarian. He or she is trained to
know the best databases for most topics and can quickly point you toward
the best ones to use.
Most libraries maintain Web pages listing the best
databases to use for specific disciplines or topics.
However, there fortunately are a few key databases you can keep in mind
that will help speed up your engineering research considerably!
14
General Engineering Information
If you’re just looking for a few general articles or for broad information on a
topic, try one of these general resources. They will cover not only
engineering subjects but a wide variety of science and non-science topics.
Note that not every one of these databases may be available at your home
library:
ACADEMIC SEARCH PREMIER (Ebsco)
An indexed and abstracted collection of over 8,000 general and technical serials
in all subject areas, over half available in full text.
APPLIED SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY ABSTRACTS
(H. W. Wilson)
Indexes and abstracts a selection of leading trade and industrial
publications, professional and technical society journals, specialized
subject periodicals, plus buyers' guides, directories, and conference
proceedings in all areas.
GENERAL SCIENCE ABSTRACTS (H. W. Wilson)
A bibliographic database that indexes and abstracts articles of at least one
column in length from English-language periodicals published in the
United States and Great Britain. Periodical coverage includes popular
science magazines as well as professional journals. Also covers The New
York Times Science Section.
INFOTRAC ONEFILE (Proquest)
A one-stop source for news and periodical articles on a wide range of
topics: business, computers, current events, economics, education,
environmental issues, health care, hobbies, humanities, law, literature and
art, politics, science, social sciences, sports, technology, and many general
interest topics. Millions of full-text articles.
LEXIS-NEXIS (Reed-Elsevier)
A collection of full-text articles from newspapers, news magazines, media
transcripts and related resources, as well as online access to state and
federal case law; codes and statutes; court documents; over 3.5 billion
public records (the most available anywhere online); business news, and
legal news.
For more technical engineering information (but still broad and covering a
wide variety of subjects) try one of these:
Ei COMPENDEX
The world’s premier engineering bibliographic database covering over
5,000 scholarly journals, trade magazines and conference proceedings in
all engineering fields.
15
INSPEC
The world's leading bibliographic database providing comprehensive
global coverage of scientific and technical literature in the fields of
physics, electrical engineering, electronics and computer science; includes
over 3,000 scientific and technical journals and 2,000 conference
proceedings annually.
SCOPUS (General and Citation Searching)
Scopus is an abstract and citation database of research literature and
quality web sources including over 15,000 titles from 4,000 different
publishers, of which over 12,850 are academic journals including
coverage of 535 Open Access journals.
WEB OF SCIENCE (General and Citation Searching)
The Web of Science provides seamless access to current and retrospective
multidisciplinary information from approximately 8,700 of the most
prestigious, high impact research journals in the world. Web of Science
also provides cited reference searching.
No matter what kind of engineer you are or what engineering topic you may
be researching, you should always check Compendex! This database is the
premiere engineering resource. It covers all engineering disciplines and
reaches back to 1896, if you need historical perspective.
A caveat. The recent publications of the Society of Automotive
Engineers (SAE) are poorly represented in Compendex. Any
search involving these papers needs to also be done using SAE’s own
publications search at its Web site.
Inspec covers primarily electrical engineering, physics, communications and
computer and control science. It also offers great breadth of scope, reaching
back to 1898 in the form of the Inspec Archive – Science Abstracts.
Because of its physics connection Inspec often includes a surprising array of
topics you would not otherwise expect—and its lengthy period of coverage
gives you access to a wealth of seminal historic papers and data.
Web of Science (WoS) is the Internet version of Science Citation Index
(SCI). For many years SCI and WoS were essentially the only ways one
could do citation searching. Taking a known paper, you could search
forward in time to see who had cited that paper and backward in time to see
what references its authors had used in writing the paper. These citation
trails then led you to additional papers on the same or related topics. When
it was first developed by Eugene Garfield, this method of doing research was
unique—and it remains a useful and powerful research tool.
16
In just the past few years, however, a competing citation index has appeared.
Its name is Scopus and it offers the same kind of citation searching and
analysis that Web of Science does, but features broader coverage. WoS
limits itself to the 6,000 or so most cited journals. Scopus includes over
15,000 journals, over half of them from countries other than the United
States. If your research has worldwide scope, particularly in the developing
world, then Scopus may be an excellent tool for ferreting out elusive
information from and about those areas. Scopus also includes access to
many Web resources and patents, as well as over 600 trade publications not
always indexed elsewhere. The downside is that libraries often must choose
between Web of Science and Scopus, since subscribing to both represents
considerable expense. Thus, Scopus may not be available in every library.
There appears below an extensive listing of engineering
databases arranged by discipline—but first, let’s look at some
helpful tips and hints for searching any engineering database.
 Use individual terms or short phrases when searching; once you have
a feel for what kind of results you’re getting, then you can combine
terms in more complex ways. For example:
o Nanotechnology
o Beam splitter
 Phrase searching usually involves enclosing the phrase in double
quotes—but some databases use single quotes or offer special search
boxes for phrase searching. For example:
o “Surface micromachining”
o “Deep etching technology”
 Know your truncation and wildcard symbols. These are often the
asterisk * and exclamation point ! respectively, but they can vary from
one database to another. These symbols are used to search for varying
forms of a word. The * usually replaces one or more letters, while the
! replaces a single letter. In some cases you can specify more than
one letter as well. For example:
17
o Comput* -- retrieves computer, computers, computing,
computation, etc.
o Wom!n – retrieves woman or women
 Understand and use Boolean connectors, especially AND, OR and
NOT. AND narrows a search, requiring that all the specified terms be
present; OR broadens a search, requiring that any or all of the
specified terms be present; NOT narrows a search by excluding a term
or terms. For example:
o “Bulk micromachining” AND “liquid solvents”
o “Deep Reactive Ion Etching” OR DRIE
o “MEMS devices” NOT polymers
 Be aware of more specialized Boolean connectors and their use, e.g.
NEAR, SAME, WITHIN (usually abbreviated to W/ ). These are
often called proximity operators and they may not be available in all
databases. They are used to search for terms in some exact relation to
one another within a given field of a record. For example:
o Metals NEAR properties (e.g. within 10 words)
o Metals SAME MEMS (terms appear in same field)
o Metals W/3 hysteresis (terms separated by 3 or fewer words)
 Typically, author names are entered into a database in whatever form
they appeared in the original article or source. To insure that you
retrieve all occurrences of an author’s work in a database, consult the
author index for that database. For example:
o
o
o
o
o
Fred Muggs
F Muggs
JF Muggs
J Fred Muggs
John Frederick Muggs
 Know the difference between keyword searching and thesaurus
searching. Keywords can be any term used in the title or abstract or
elsewhere in a record—thesaurus terms are standardized and restricted
terms assigned by an indexer in a consistent way to describe the topic
of an article. You may need to search for both.
18
 Once you’ve found a useful article, look at its complete bibliographic
record and see what descriptive terms and thesaurus terms have been
assigned to it. This will give you ideas for other terms to use in your
search that you may not have thought of previously.
 Be aware of ways you can limit your search to retrieve exactly what
you want. You may be able to limit by date, document type, treatment
type, discipline, and/or language. You can also usually limit your
search to specific parts of a record (fields), e.g. journal title or the
author’s address.
 Common words such as a, an, the, with, by and so forth are generally
ignored by database search software. These are called stopwords.
Numerals and special characters are usually ignored also. Stopwords
and special characters may still be searchable using specialized
techniques.
 Database search software usually ignores whether terms are entered as
UPPER- or lowercase.
19
Discipline-Specific Journal and Proceedings Article Databases
This list suggests a number of journal article databases that may contain
useful information for the disciplines shown. Your local librarian can
suggest additional possibilities—there are many!
Aerospace Engineering
Aerospace and High Technology Database (CSA)
ANTE: Abstracts in New Technologies & Engineering (CSA)
Compendex
Mechanical and Transportation Engineering Abstracts (CSA)
Mechanical Engineering Abstracts (CSA)
Scientific and Technical Aerospace Reports
Biomedical Engineering
Agricultural and Environmental Biotechnology Abstracts (CSA)
Agricultural Engineering Abstracts
ANTE: Abstracts in New Technologies & Engineering (CSA)
BioEngineering Abstracts (CSA)
Biological Abstracts
BIOSIS Previews
Biotechnology & Bioengineering Abstracts (CSA)
CAB Abstracts
Chemical Abstracts (or SciFinder Scholar)
Compendex
Engineered Materials Abstracts (CSA)
Ergonomics Abstracts Online
Medical and Pharmaceutical Biotechnology Abstracts (CSA)
MEDLINE (or PubMed)
TOXLINE (CSA)
Web of Science
Business Resources
ABI/Inform
Business Source Premier
Factiva
Lexis-Nexis
Chemical Engineering
ACS Free Search
Advanced Polymers Abstracts (CSA)
ANTE: Abstracts in New Technologies & Engineering (CSA)
Chemical Abstracts (or SciFinder Scholar)
20
Compendex
Composites Industry Abstracts (CSA)
Corrosion Abstracts (CSA)
EnergyFiles
Environmental Sciences and Pollution Management (CSA)
MEDLINE (or PubMed)
Metadex
TOXLINE (CSA)
Web of Science
Civil Engineering
ANTE: Abstracts in New Technologies & Engineering (CSA)
ASCE Civil Engineering Database
Civil Engineering Abstracts (CSA)
Compendex
Web of Science
 Environmental Engineering
DOE Information Bridge
EnergyFiles
Environmental Engineering Abstracts (CSA)
Environmental Sciences and Pollution Management (CSA)
Lexis-Nexis Environmental
Pollution Abstracts (CSA)
SciFinder Scholar (for chemistry and the environment)
TOXLINE (CSA)
Water Resources Abstracts (CSA)
 Geotechnical and Geological Engineering
Aqualine (CSA)
Earthquake Engineering Abstracts (CSA)
Geobase (FS)
GeoRef
Meteorological and Geoastrophysical Abstracts (CSA)
Oceanic Abstracts (CSA)
Water Resources Abstracts (CSA)
 Transportation Engineering
Mechanical and Transportation Engineering Abstracts (CSA)
National Transportation Library
TLCat: Transportation Library Union Catalog
Transportation Research Board Publications Index
TRIS: Transportation Research Information Service
21
Computer Science
ACM Digital Library
ANTE: Abstracts in New Technologies & Engineering (CSA)
CiteSeer: Research Index
Compendex
Computer and Information Systems Abstracts (CSA)
Electronics and Communications Abstracts (CSA)
IEEE Xplore
INSPEC
Internet and Personal Computing Abstracts (CSA)
Web of Science
Electrical and Computer Engineering
ACM Digital Library
ANTE: Abstracts in New Technologies & Engineering (CSA)
CiteSeer: Research Index
Compendex
Electronics and Communications Abstracts (CSA)
EnergyFiles
IEEE Xplore
INSPEC
Scitation Database (AIP, SPIE)
Solid State and Superconductivity Abstracts (CSA)
Web of Science
Industrial and Manufacturing Systems Engineering
ACM Digital Library
ANTE: Abstracts in New Technologies & Engineering (CSA)
Compendex
Ergonomics Abstracts Online
Health and Safety Science Abstracts (CSA)
IEEE Xplore
INSPEC
Risk Abstracts (CSA)
Safety Science and Risk Abstracts (CSA)
Web of Science
Materials Science
Advanced Polymers Abstracts (CSA)
Aluminum Industry Abstracts (CSA)
ANTE: Abstracts in New Technologies & Engineering (CSA)
Ceramic Abstracts/World Ceramics Abstracts (CSA)
Chemical Abstracts (or SciFinder Scholar)
Compendex
Corrosion Abstracts (CSA)
Engineered Materials Abstracts (CSA)
Materials Business File (CSA)
22
Metadex (CSA)
Web of Science
Weldasearch (CSA)
Mechanical Engineering
Aerospace and High Technology Database (CSA)
ANTE: Abstracts in New Technologies & Engineering (CSA)
Compendex
Mechanical and Transportation Engineering Abstracts (CSA)
Mechanical Engineering Abstracts (CSA)
Metadex
SAE Publications Search
Web of Science
Nuclear Engineering
ANTE: Abstracts in New Technologies & Engineering (CSA)
Chemical Abstracts (or SciFinder Scholar)
Compendex
DOE Information Bridge
Energy Citations Database
EnergyFiles
ETDEWEB
IEEE Xplore
INIS Database
INSPEC
OSTI Information Bridge
STINET
Web of Science
Systems Engineering and Operations Research
ANTE: Abstracts in New Technologies & Engineering (CSA)
Compendex
Current Index to Statistics
Ergonomics Abstracts Online
Health and Safety Science Abstracts (CSA)
INSPEC
MathSciNet
Risk Abstracts (CSA)
Safety Science and Risk Abstracts (CSA)
TOXLINE (CSA)
Web of Science
23
Finding Books
No matter what anyone may tell you, the book is far from dead.
If
you don’t believe it, just go by any Barnes & Noble bookstore just about any
time of the day or night they may be open. Chances are, there will be more
people there than in your local library, alas!
In any case, there will be times when you may need or want a book on a
particular topic or a book that contains some bit of information you need.
How can you find out what books exist and where they are?
Your first line of attack is likely to be the online catalog for your own
college or university library. This resource will tell you:
 what books are owned by your school
 which library they are in
 whether or not someone has them checked out
Online library catalogs are becoming more and more sophisticated every
day. Many newer versions of library catalogs also allow you to:





Search tables of contents
Read reviews of the books
Refine searches by call number range or subject category
Search for similar books (“find more like this”)
Recommend related books (“readers who checked out this book also
checked out…”)
 Sort results by relevance
 Provide automatic spell checking
 Search by or within types of materials, e.g. reference books, DVDs
You should take advantage of all these features when using your local online
catalog and take the time to learn how to search your online catalog
effectively. But remember that every online catalog has its quirks and
peculiarities—so never hesitate to ask your local librarians for assistance if
you think a search isn’t turning up what you expect or need.
24
To see an excellent example of a cutting-edge online library
catalog keyword search, visit the North Carolina State University
Libraries catalog.
When searching a library catalog to see if the library owns some
particular conference proceedings, you should be aware that
libraries often index this kind of publication in somewhat odd ways. Your
best bet often is to choose one or two unique terms from the title of the
conference (not an individual paper from the conference) and search for
these terms along with the name of the city where the conference was held
and the word “conference” or “symposium” or other appropriate term.
Sometimes, using the name or acronym for the sponsoring organization is
also helpful. For example:
diamond AND Auburn AND conference
to retrieve
Proceedings of the Sixth Applied Diamond Conference/Second Frontier Carbon
Technology Joint Conference (ADC/FCT 2001) [microform] / International
Conference on the Applications of Diamond Films and Related Materials (6th :
2001 : Auburn, Ala.) (2001)
Eventually, you will want to know about books that may exist but are not
owned by your local library. How can you find out about these books?
Think of your search in terms of a series of ever-widening
concentric circles. Your own institution’s library and its catalog are at the
center. In the next circle out would be the online catalogs of other nearby
colleges and universities. The vast majority of libraries with online catalogs
make them freely available for searching via the Internet, so if (for example)
25
you are at the University of Virginia and you want to see what books they
have at neighboring Virginia Tech, just connect to Tech’s online catalog,
known as Addison. Voila—an entirely new universe of possibilities is now
open to you!
So how do you find out about Addison and how do you figure out the URL
to use to connect to it? The easiest way to find and use most college and
university library catalogs is to go to that institution’s main Web page and
look for a link there that says “Libraries”. Clicking on it will usually bring
you to a page with a link to the online catalog.
To locate the Web pages of over 7,400 libraries and library
consortia worldwide, visit Libweb—Library WWW Servers.
The next circle out from other academic libraries might be
specialized academic or research libraries, wherever they may be located.
Sometimes their collections are general and/or comprehensive and other
times they may be narrowly focused but possess great depth. Here are some
examples of both:
Canada Institute for Scientific and Technical Information Catalogue
CATNYP – New York Public Library – Science, Industry and Business
Center for Research Libraries Online Catalog
Linda Hall Library of Science, Engineering and Technology
Voyager Online Catalog – Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University
Your local librarian can advise you about other similar sites that
may be of use or interest in your own subject area.
26
Remember, your goal now may be simply to verify the existence of a book.
Then you can ask the interlibrary loan staff at your home library to attend to
the details of borrowing a copy for you to use.
Outside the circle of specialized libraries would be the great
national libraries of various countries, such as:
Bibliotheque Nationale (France)
British Library Catalogues
German National Library of Science and Technology
Library of Chinese Academy of Sciences
Library of Congress (United States)
Again, there are many other possibilities that your local librarians can
suggest, but your goal is to try to discover items that may not be locally
available. Then you can have your home library buy or borrow them from
wherever they may be.
The next circle would contain meta-catalogs that represent
collections of holdings of many different libraries. In the United States there
are two such major resources:
OCLC (Online Computer Library Center)
RLG (Research Libraries Group)
27
Both of the above resources provide many services to libraries, principally in
terms of shared cataloging data they can use in their own local catalogs. But
they also can serve as a way of finding out about materials on a subject and
which libraries own copies of those books or other items. While full access
to the services of OCLC and RLG requires an institutional membership
(which your school may have, so ask your local librarian), you can do some
basic checks of their databases using two free Web resources.
Open WorldCat from OCLC operates by providing abridged records of its
most frequently cataloged records to various Web search engines and book
seller sites. When you search one of these, e.g. Google Scholar or Yahoo!
for a book title or author, you will see a “Find in a Library” link. Clicking
on that link takes you to a screen where you can enter your location (e.g. ZIP
code or state) and then Open WorldCat will tell you what libraries near you
own that book. Unfortunately, not all OCLC member libraries participate in
the Open WorldCat program, so your particular college or university
library’s holdings may not appear in Open WorldCat. In other words, you
shouldn’t depend upon Open WorldCat to function as a substitute for your
own school’s online catalog!
RedLightGreen from the RLG is designed specifically for undergraduates
using the Web—and the libraries that support them. It delivers information
from RLG members about more than 130 million books for education and
research, and it links students back to their campus libraries for the books
they select. RedLightGreen makes available to faculty and librarians a
number of ways to link to its services directly from course Web pages and
reserve lists, and can also assist students by providing properly formatted
bibliographic citations for found items in a variety of commonly used styles.
The main drawback to RedLightGreen is perhaps the fact that its
membership is smaller than OCLCs, so again your own institution’s library
holdings may not be included. It does seem to allow you to search many
non-member catalogs, however.
28
The last circle containing information about books might be
the resources of commercial book dealers. There are some familiar names
here, but also some that may be less familiar. They include:
Amazon.com
Barnes and Noble
BookFinder.com
Powell’s Technical Books
In all likelihood the library of your college or university will also have some
sort of arrangement with a book vendor or distributor and can use their
services to help you locate needed current items. Some schools may also
make available as one of their online databases the Bowker’s Books in
Print database, which can also help you identify current material.
This workbook does not treat the rare and out-of-print book
market, which is a world unto itself. Please consult with your
local librarians, if you are interested in rare and/or OP materials.
29
Reference Books
The
world of engineering literature is filled with handbooks,
encyclopedias, compilations of data and dozens of other kinds of reference
works. This workbook can’t possibly discuss them all. But here are a few
online resources that can bring a significant portion of the engineering
reference collection to your desktop! Not all the titles listed here may be
available at your home institution.
eFunda
eFunda stands for “engineering fundamentals”. While not, strictly speaking, a reference
book, it seeks to serve much the same kind of purpose. Its online content contains
formulae, property data, standards information, definitions, unit converters, and
mathematical fundamentals, among many other things. Access to full contents requires a
paid subscription.
ENGnetBASE
ENGnetBASE contains over 400 handbooks and reference works published by the CRC
Press. These materials are fully searchable and printable in PDF format. Covers a wide
variety of engineering disciplines.
ENGnetBASE allows for both automatic synonym searching and
for fuzzy searching. Fuzzy searching will retrieve words even if
they are misspelled.
ENVIROnetBASE
ENVIROnetBASE includes over 180 handbooks and reference works published by the
CRC Press in areas relating to civil engineering, earth science, environmental science,
geology, air pollution, remote sensing and GIS applications, and water science,
technology and engineering. Material is fully searchable and printable in PDF format.
Knovel Interactive Library
Contains over 650 titles from more than 30 leading publishing partners including
McGraw-Hill, Wiley, Springer and Elsevier. Covers the principal subject areas of
engineering and allows for in-depth online searching of content, including tables, graphs
and equations.
30
Using Knovel’s suite of Productivity Tools you can customize
data in tables as you would in an Excel spreadsheet; extract data
from tables built on equations and plot graphs using the
coefficients; use digitized graphs to capture coordinates; and plot graphs
from the raw data to compare variables and perform “what if” experiments.
Other tools enable you to draw and search chemical structures, and view and
perform calculations on spectra and phase diagrams.
MATHnetBASE
MATHnetBASE features over 120 mathematical reference titles published by the CRC
Press. These materials are fully searchable and printable in PDF format. Covers all areas
of mathematics, statistics and probability but would be of particular interest for applied
mathematics, engineering mathematics and the mathematics of computation.
McGraw-Hill’s Digital Engineering Library
The DEL provides online access to over 150 engineering reference titles published by
McGraw-Hill in twelve major areas of engineering. The 5,000+ articles are fully
searchable and once found are displayed in “by-the-book” layout. Retrieved material can
be printed or E-mailed.
Safari Tech Books Online
While not strictly limited to traditional reference books, this service provides full online
access to hundreds of books related to computer programming, Web development,
business IT, and related digital matters. It is fully searchable down to the level of
individual lines of programming code. The many how-to and programming language
books in Safari can easily serve the function of reference tools for the topics covered.
You can cut-and-paste lines of code from Safari books into your
own applications, saving time and programming effort. Always
be aware, however, that copyright restrictions may apply to any
use of someone else’s computer code.
31
Web Searching
It’s hard to believe now that little more than ten years ago there
wasn’t any World Wide Web. Now we are thoroughly enmeshed in it, and
many students often think that there is almost nowhere else to look for
information. We all use the Web every day, so it is essential to know how to
search the Web effectively—and how to know whether what we find there is
accurate and authoritative.
There are essentially three ways to search the Web:
 Search Engines (General)
 Search Engines (Specialized)
 Indexes and Directories
An example of a general search engine would be the well-known Google
search service. A specialized search engine for engineering topics would be
EEVL. And an example of a Web index would be the Athenus Engineering
and Science Search service. There are many, many others of each type that
could also serve as examples.
Even though I am making a distinction here between a “Web search engine”
and “a Web index,” the differences between the two have blurred
considerably since the early days of the Web. Without going into a lengthy
discussion of the differences, they boil down to this: a Web search engine is
compiled mechanically by a computer program called a crawler or spider,
and a Web index is prepared (or at least edited) manually by human beings.
The result usually is that the search engine’s database is very, very large but
may contain a great deal of junk relative to the good stuff—while a Web
index is much smaller and more selective but usually contains relatively
little junk versus the good stuff.
Generally speaking, if you are trolling for information and don’t have a good
idea of what it is you’re looking for or don’t know where it may be located,
use a Web search engine. But if you are looking for high quality
information on a narrowly focused topic, you might first try a Web index.
32
So what are the best search engines and indexes? As with so much else in
the world of libraries and information, that depends. It mostly depends on
how you want to define “best”—most comprehensive? Easiest to use?
Fastest? Most pleasing display of results? Fewest ads? Most search
features? Etc., etc., etc. When push comes to shove, it often boils down to a
feeling you come to have regarding how successful a given search engine is
at providing you with what you’re looking for—and how well you like the
search features of the engine.
But you need to realize that even among the 800 pound gorillas of the Web
searching world there are differences in coverage and completeness. There
is NO single search engine that “does it all”. Studies have shown that about
half the pages listed in any given search engine are unique to just that
engine! So even if you enjoy using a particular engine more than any other,
be aware of its competitors, since often you may find things with one of
them that aren’t in your favorite.
All that said, as of January 2006 a list of the top general Web search engines
would probably include the following:




Ask.com [formerly Teoma]
Google
MSN Search
Yahoo! Search
Each search engine may have its own quirks and unique ways of doing
things, but in general the most prominent of them all share a few
characteristics that you can use to make your searching more effective and
efficient.
First of all, search engines—unlike most journal article databases—tend to
rank their results by “relevance” rather than by date or alphabetically. So
what does “relevance” mean? Typically, the search engine uses some kind
of algorithm to determine how many times your search term(s) appear in
certain places on a Web page and/or how often your terms appear together
on the same Web page and/or how close together are they on the page. This
presumably insures that those pages that are most relevant to a particular set
of search terms appear near the top of any list of results.
33
A caveat. Web page designers sometimes attempt to “beat the
system” by using various tricks to insure that their pages appear
to be more relevant than may actually be the case. The search
engine designers then try to compensate for these tricks. Sometimes one
side is ahead and sometimes the other. But be aware that some retrieved
sites may have little or nothing to do with your search simply because some
wily person has fiddled with the system.
Another caveat. Some search engines accept payment in
exchange for having a particular Web site always appear near the
top of a search listing. Sometimes this is fine and the page is
perfectly good and useful—but there is no guarantee that top placement
equates to top quality.
Most search engine users—and in particular students—tend to stick a few
words in the simple search box and click GO. Then they either accept as
“good enough” whatever comes back—or else they throw up their hands in
despair when their “simple” search returns 10,748,396 hits. So what can you
do?
Well, for starters make use of the engine’s Advanced Search capability, if it
has one—and most of the major search engines do. The advanced search
allows you to be much more specific about how your search terms are
included, excluded and/or combined—the equivalent of Boolean searching.
It also will allow you to limit by such things as date, domain, type of file,
language and other factors that may enable you to whittle down the size of
your results list while boosting its quality. Yes, it may take a bit more effort
to set up your search—but the quality of results will reward you for it.
Limiting a search by domain to just .edu or .org sites is an easy
way to filter out a lot of unwanted “commercial” stuff and raise
the potential for retrieving useful “academic” material. Another
good strategy is to limit to pages where your search terms appear in the title
of the page. And finally, filter out non-English pages, unless you are
comfortable with pages written in foreign languages.
Well, Advanced Search is nice but is there anything you can do to help
improve your search results and still make use of the convenience of the
34
simple search box? Yes, there is. Most search engines make use of a
relatively simple search syntax that you can employ when using their simple
search capability to have some control over how your search is interpreted
and performed. Here are the basic commands:




A plus sign in front of a term or phrase means it must appear
A minus sign in front of a term or phrase means is should not appear
Terms enclosed in quotation marks are treated as a phrase
You can usually employ a Boolean OR with terms. (Note that Google
requires the OR to be uppercase!)
There are a number of other things you can do in a full-featured search
engine like Google as well, but the four things shown above can go a long
way toward improving search results. You can usually indicate that terms
appear in certain fields of a page, too, by typing something like title: in front
of your search term. To make effective use of this, however, means you
must learn the appropriate field tags—and it’s usually easier and faster just
to use the engine’s advanced search screen.
Major search engines all offer many additional kinds of searching beyond
the standard Web page search. Check the capabilities of whatever engine
you are using for what may be available. Some typical kinds of searches
include images, maps, product catalogs, news group readers, videos, and
telephone number information.
When using a Web search engine to look for images, always
remember that the engine can’t “see” a picture and know what
it’s about like you can. It is relying on tags (known as metadata) that have
been assigned to the picture describing its content.
Google Scholar
One particular feature of the Google search engine that has gotten
considerable press (and some notoriety) is Google Scholar. This is an
attempt by Google to provide “a simple way to broadly search for scholarly
literature. From one place, you can search across many disciplines and
sources: peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, abstracts and articles, from
academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories,
universities and other scholarly organizations.” Google’s relevance ranking
35
supposedly insures that the “best” resources on a topic appear near the top of
any list of resources.
And—supposedly—largely irrelevant and/or
commercial resources are excluded from the database, thus boosting the
overall signal-to-noise ratio of any Google Scholar search.
Among librarians and information professionals the jury is still out. Yes, it
returns useful information with less junk included—but Google Scholar
relies on publishers and libraries to make their information available to the
database. So coverage on one topic may be extensive but on another topic it
may be minimal. Also, you should note that Google Scholar may show you
the reference to a particularly good resource but you may still be required to
check your own library’s catalog to see if it is available at your institution.
Also, unless your institution has the rights to view full text online, you may
not be able to see the complete information without paying or making use of
interlibrary loan. In short, as it’s currently constituted, you and your
students cannot rely solely on Google Scholar as a discovery tool—you still
need to use the commercial databases that your library subscribes to.
Metasearch Engines
Another sort of general Web search engine is the meta-search engine. These
tools simultaneously query several individual major search engines and then
return to you a combined partial listing of the results that were found in each
of them. The advantage of a meta-search engine is the ability to search
multiple databases at once—but the disadvantage, often very significant, is
that the meta-search usually only shows you a fraction of all the available
results. But if you have absolutely no clue as to where the information you
are looking for resides—or if it even exists—then starting with a metasearch engine may give you a sense of the best place(s) to look and what’s
out there in general.
Some good meta-search engines might include:
 Clusty
 Dogpile
 Ixquick
36
Graphical Search Engines
A somewhat different kind of search engine that has also gotten some buzz
in the information press is the graphical search engine. These tools don’t
display just a text listing of results but rather attempt to conceptually group
results in terms of various kinds of pictorial displays. These visual displays
try to show the “spatial” as well as intellectual relationships of concepts as a
means of helping you navigate through information space to the precise
items that interest you. Often, when you click on some node of a display,
another relational diagram appears, the process repeating until you reach a
terminal node that is presumably the document you desire. Another
variation on this theme is a search engine that displays thumbnails of the
retrieved pages to help you decide whether the page looks interesting before
you have to download it in its entirety.
Some graphical search engines might include:
 Grokker
 KartOO
 Mooter
Specialty Search Engines
There are hundreds, if not thousands, of specialty search engines covering
many subjects. Here are just a few that relate primarily to engineering and
science and are broad in scope. There are others available that deal
primarily with specific engineering disciplines or particular types of
information, e.g. government Web pages that will be discussed elsewhere in
this workbook.




Athenus
EEVL
GlobalSpec
Scirus
37
Web Directories
Finally, there are the directories and indexes, tools which are compiled or at
least edited by human beings. These often cover a wide range of topics but
many include significant engineering components. Since these resources are
not machine-compiled, the depth of their coverage on any give topic may
vary widely. Typically, however, the items included will be of excellent
quality and Web directories may be a good place to start a search when you
are unsure of what’s available or of what the best resources are in a given
field of study.
Some excellent Web indexes include:







BUBL (Bulletin Board for Libraries—U.K. based)
INFOMINE—Scholarly Internet Resource Collections
Librarians’ Internet Index
Pinakes—a Subject Launchpad (U.K. based)
Scout Report Archives
WWW Virtual Library: Engineering (now hosted by EEVL)
Yahoo! Directory Search
As with all things informational, if you are having trouble using any of the
above resources or need additional help in identifying useful Web search
engines and directories, always check with your local librarians for
assistance and suggestions!
Evaluating Web Sites
Knowing whether or not the information contained on a particular Web page
is good, bad or indifferent is often a challenge in itself. Just because a Web
page looks good or like it comes from an authoritative source is not always
an accurate indicator of its actual worth or reliability. It’s a good idea to
view any unknown Web page with a healthy dose of skepticism until you
can verify its value and provenance.
So how can one evaluate a Web page? There are numerous examples of
ways to approach this task on the Web sites of libraries all across the Web.
38
Check to see if your own library or university provides such a page and refer
your students to it to help them develop their evaluative skills. You can find
an extensive listing of such pages as part of the Information Quality
WWW Virtual Library located at
http://www.vuw.ac.nz/staff/alastair_smith/evaln/evaln.htm
A list of typical evaluation criteria might include these, as adapted from
Robert Berkman’s book The Skeptical Business Searcher: The Information
Advisor’s Guide to Evaluating Web Data, Sites, and Sources. (Information
Today, Inc., Medford, NJ, 2004, pp. 243-246):
1. How was the site identified? Who recommended it?
2. What is the organization behind the site?
3. Who is the site’s author? How well-known are they?
4. How does the author demonstrate his/her credibility and authority?
5. How does the author present his/her work? (Research methodology)
6. Is the information clearly and logically presented?
7. Is there any evidence of bias?
8. How current is the material?
9. Is there equivalent material in other formats (print, CDROM, database) to
which you can compare the web material?
10. Can you verify the information independently? Can you contact the
author to discuss his/her work? Can anyone you trust corroborate the
information or credibility of the author?
39
Government Information
It has been said that the single largest producer of scientific and
technical information in this country is the United States Federal
Government. Whether or not this is absolutely true, there is a wealth of
government produced information available to anyone willing to search it
out. This workbook section will cover generally available government
produced technical information—military information sources, technical
reports produced by government agencies, and patent information are
covered in other sections of the class.
You should note that every academic library of any size usually has
someone (or several persons) on its staff who specializes in locating
government documents. Many of the largest academic libraries have whole
departments devoted to government produced information and maintain
extensive collections of this material as a part of a nationwide network of
federal depository libraries. If your school has one of these fortunate
libraries, you have a vast, often untapped information resource available to
you that you should really become better acquainted with. Seek out and get
to know your government documents librarian and you may be richly
rewarded!
Pretty much every government agency produces some kind of information.
Most of them have their own Web pages—and many of them provide a
means of searching their own libraries of documents. Sometimes, if you are
concerned primarily with the data from a particular agency, using these
narrowly focused search facilities is a good strategy. But other times, you
may not know where the data you seek is located or what agency produced
it. In those cases you need a more broad-based search engine—and
fortunately there is one.
Science.gov
There is a general search engine for all government agencies called
Firstgov.gov. This can be a fine resource for searching for many kinds of
government produced information. But sometimes you can do even better
40
by using the more narrowly focused Science.gov—Firstgov for Science,
which will weed out the Web pages of non-science agencies.
Science.gov searches over 47 million Web pages from 1,700+ agencyselected sites. Like many commercial Web search engines, Science.gov
provides results based upon relevancy ranking. Two major types of
information are included: selected authoritative science Web sites and often
hard-to-access science databases. You have the option to sort your results
by source.
Science.gov includes sites that are rich in science content. The content may
consist of scientific or technical data, publications, databases,
documentation, or other forms of information. The content might also be
science resources such as scientific user facilities, experts in scientific
disciplines, or contacts to consult for assistance. It does not include sites
that are merely organization home pages, nor does it include sites that
require a password or other access privilege.
So what is the difference between Science.gov and, say, Google or another
of the major Web search engines? Principally, it is that the information in
Science.gov is selected and maintained by human librarians and agency
information managers, whereas the information in private sector search
engines is usually acquired mechanically via spidering programs. The
quality and authority of Science.gov’s information is thus quite high, since it
supposedly represents the “best” resources of the contributing agencies.
Like most search engines, Science.gov provides both a basic and an
advanced search capability—though the latter is somewhat more limited
than some commercial search services.
You can search Science.gov as if it were a Web directory by choosing the
subject category that interests you and drilling down to individual Web
pages.
Note the “Special Collections” links at the bottom left of the
initial search page. These allow you to zero in on such things as
federal regulations, federal R&D summaries, grants, internships
and fellowships, conferences and thesauri.
41
Science.gov also provides an alerting service, which will be discussed in
more detail in the “Alerts” section of this workbook.
Other Government Science and Engineering Resources
As mentioned above, most U.S. science related government agencies
maintain their own Web sites and have their own searching capabilities.
There are several of these of particular note for engineers:
Department of Defense
The DoD maintains the Defense Technical Information Center (DTIC)
and provides a search engine for unclassified DoD science and
technology material. It offers several ways to “mix and match” the
kinds of sites to search and the agencies that produce them.
Department of Energy
The DOE operates the Office of Scientific and Technical Information
(OSTI) which in turn allows searching of several subject-focused
databases.
These include the DOE Information Bridge, the
EnergyFiles database, and the Energy Citations Database among
others.
Note the link to “International Databases” on the left side
of the OSTI screen—a good way to tap in to even more
energy information.
Department of Transportation
Through its Bureau of Transportation Statistics and the Transportation
Research Board, the DoT makes available two particularly useful
databases. One is TRIS Online, which contains citations to over half a
million records of transportation research, and the other is the
National Transportation Library, which makes available several very
42
useful transportation related databases, including TLCat, a union
catalog of transportation libraries all over the world. The guest view
is free but may limit your results, unless your host library is a
member.
TRIS Online can sometimes be tricky to use. TRIS
assumes that adjacent terms are a phrase—so careful use of
Boolean connectors is often essential to retrieve exactly
what you’re looking for.
Environmental Protection Agency
The EPA provides a staggering amount of information related to air,
water and land quality via its Web site. Check their Information
Sources page for a listing.
The “Window to My Environment” located in the Where
You Live section provides a handy way to access
considerable information about the environmental
conditions and situation in your own location or any location of
interest. You can also access raw data and information on regulations,
hazardous sites, pending legislation and many other kinds of
information.
National Aeronautics and Space Administration
NASA maintains a Scientific and Technical Information gateway page
that includes links to such familiar things as the NASA Technical
Reports server and the Scientific and Aerospace Technical Reports
(STAR) database. A number of additional databases are also available,
including one for locating NASA-generated images. Look in the “For
Researchers” section for links to these resources.
43
Patents, Trademarks and Copyright
Patents are of essential interest to many engineers, particularly those
working in industry but also those in academe who may develop new
products and processes and wish to protect their intellectual property or
inventions. Many large universities now have offices within the school
whose job it is to help faculty obtain patents. But if you wish to do
preliminary work on your own or you would like to acquaint your students
with the world of patents or you’re just curious about patents for some
particular device, there are a number of places to go for information.
Note that collections of patents in hardcopy exist in selected major libraries
across the country. By U.S. law there must be at least one patent depository
library in every state. Check with your local engineering librarian to see
whether your school’s library is a patent depository or where the closest one
to you is.
What is a patent?
The definition in the USPTO Glossary states that a patent is “…a property
right granted by the Government of the United States of America to an
inventor ‘to exclude others from making, using, offering for sale, or selling
the invention throughout the United States or importing the invention into
the United States’ for a limited time in exchange for public disclosure of the
invention when the patent is granted.”
And what is a trademark?
The definition in the USPTO Glossary states that a trademark is the word or
symbol used to “protect words, names, symbols, sounds, or colors that
distinguish goods and services from those manufactured or sold by others
and to indicate the source of the goods. Trademarks, unlike patents, can be
renewed forever as long as they are being used in commerce.”
44
United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO)
The Web pages and database of the USPTO is the definitive source for
information on all things related to patents and trademarks issued by the
United States government. The USPTO Web site offers the capability to
search for both patents and trademarks. You may search the full text of U.S.
patents issued since 1976 using a variety of search parameters. Views of
drawings and specifications are generally available. Page images of patents
issued between 1790 and 1975 are also available but these patents are
currently searchable only by patent number or current U.S. classification.
The USPTO trademark database, called TESS—Trademark Electronic
Search System—contains over 3 million current, pending and dead
trademarks registered with the federal government. This is the same
database available to patent and trademark attorneys. You can search by
words and/or phrases in various ways or browse an index of terms. For
many results an image of the actual trademark is also returned.
There is a service called Patent Alert (not affiliated with the USPTO) which
allows you to receive notification of newly issued patents in any of about
three dozen broad categories. After registration, you can set up your free
alerts and receive them weekly, biweekly or monthly. The alerts link to the
text of the patents at the USPTO web site.
Foreign Patents
The United States is not the only country in the world that issues patents.
Most of the major industrialized nations of the world provide similar kinds
of rights and laws to cover the inventions of their own inventors, and you
may sometimes need or want to learn about devices and processes patented
in other countries. Most of the patent offices of those countries have Web
pages and may or may not offer databases of their patents. However, one
very useful centralized worldwide patent searching service is that of the
European Patent Office, which provides the free esp@cenet® patent
database.
In September 2005, esp@cenet® held data on 59 million patents from 72
countries, including 7 million abstracts in English of Japanese patents. A
45
total of 28.8 million of these patents have a title, while 26.8 million have an
ECLA (European CLAssification) class and 17.3 million an abstract in
English. You should note that not all of the records contained in this
database are full-text of the patents—the text coverage and patent dates vary
widely depending upon the issuing country. You can find a table showing
the coverage parameters for the esp@cenet® database at:
http://ep.espacenet.com/espacenet/ep/EN/helpV3/coveragefac.html
There is also an extensive series of online tutorials and help documents
called esp@cenet® assistant that includes a guided tour and a series of 28
“crash courses” each lasting no more than three minutes that cover all
aspects of using the database at:
http://www.european-patent-office.org/wbt/espacenet/
assistant.php?CY=ep&LG=en&nStartIndex=0
There are many other links to patent offices and commercial patent research
services available via the Internet. Your home school may also subscribe to
one or more such services. Check with your local librarians to see what
kinds of patent searching resources are available to you at your home
institution.
Learning More About Patents
There are many print and online resources for
learning more about patents, how to search for
them, and how to apply for them. Here are
several such resources:
Patent Searching: Tutorial and Guide to
Online Resources and Information
McKinney Engineering Library, University of
Texas
http://www.lib.utexas.edu/engin/patenttutorial/index.htm
Patent Drawing for a Motorized Ice
Cream Cone
46
Web Based Patent Searching Tutorial
Science and Engineering Library, University of California at San Diego
http://scilib.ucsd.edu/howto/guides/patsearch/index.html
Patent, Copyright & Trademark - A Desk Reference to Intellectual
Property Law by Stephen Elias and Lisa Goldoftas, Nolo Press, 1996
If your local library has a government information resources section and/or a
library staff member who specializes in government information resources,
you may also find that this person is an excellent resource for information
relating to patents and trademarks.
Intellectual Property Rights in General
The broader topic of intellectual property rights, including copyright as it
applies to printed materials of all sorts, may also be of interest. While the
many facets of copyright are beyond the scope of this workbook, the issues
raised by “fair use” of copyrighted material both on and off the Internet are
ones that many faculty and students wrestle with during the course of their
studies and projects. Here are some resources that may be useful in trying to
understand and cope with these issues:
Copyright Information
Acquisitions Department, University of Virginia Library
http://www.lib.virginia.edu/acquisitions/copyright/
Copyright and the University Community: Implementing
Comprehensive Copyright Policy
Georgia Harper, Office of General Counsel, University of Texas System
http://www.utsystem.edu/ogc/Intellectualproperty/admin3.htm
a
Issues in Scholarly Information
University Library, University of Virginia
http://www.lib.virginia.edu/scholcomm.html
There are many other similar resources. Check with your own institution or
library for ones developed by them.
Another organization you may wish to investigate for helping you to protect
and distribute your own intellectual work is Creative Commons. Creative
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Commons assists the authors and creators of scholarly and entertainment
works in attaining a reasonable balance between narrow, completely
restricted use of a work and completely free and unrestricted use. Creative
Commons has developed a Web application that helps people dedicate their
creative works to the public domain—or retain their copyright while
licensing them as free for certain uses, on certain conditions. Unlike the
GNU GPL, Creative Commons licenses are not designed for software, but
rather for other kinds of creative works: websites, scholarship, music, film,
photography, literature, courseware, etc. They hope to build upon and
complement the work of others who have created public licenses for a
variety of creative works. Their aim is not only to increase the sum of raw
source material online, but also to make access to that material cheaper and
easier. To this end, they have also developed metadata that can be used to
associate creative works with their public domain or license status in a
machine-readable way. They hope this will enable people to use their search
application and other online applications to find, for example, photographs
that are free to use provided that the original photographer is credited, or
songs that may be copied, distributed, or sampled with no restrictions
whatsoever. They hope that the ease of use fostered by machine-readable
licenses will further reduce barriers to creativity. (Adapted from the CC web
page.)
Creative Commons also provides a Science Commons site. Science
Commons attempts to apply the principles of Creative Commons to the
realm of science. SC works in three areas: publishing, licensing and data.
SC is devoted to easing unnecessary barriers to the flow of scientific
knowledge and technical information. They work to encourage scientific
innovation by making it easier for scientists, universities, and enterprises to
share scientific literature, data, and materials. Their goal is to encourage
stakeholders to create–through standardized licenses and other means–areas
of free access and inquiry; a “science commons” built out of private
agreements, not imposed from above. (Adapted from the SC web page.)
You and your students and colleagues may wish to investigate and adapt the
principles of the Creative Commons and Science Commons to your own
intellectual property in addition to the legal rights also available to you via
traditional copyright.
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Standards
The
world is full of standards and organizations promulgating
standards. Sometimes, you will need to know what the standard is for a
particular process or material—and sometimes you will simply need to know
whether there is a standard for a particular process or material. Finding out
the answer to this latter question is, by and large, easier to do on the Internet
than obtaining an actual copy of the complete standard itself. Those who
devise standards usually want to charge you to read them! Nonetheless, here
at least are some ways you can determine whether a standard may be “out
there”. Once you know the answer to this question, then you can either buy
a copy yourself or ask your local library to obtain it for you.
 ANSI (The American National Standards Institute)
You can search for information about individual ANSI standards using the NSSN service
described below. The ANSI site itself contains a wealth of other information about its
own activities and other public and members-only documents available from ANSI.
 ASTM (The American Society for Testing and Materials)
Most engineering libraries will likely have a copy of the ASTM standards in their
collection. Some may have online access. You can search for summary information
about any of 12,000+ ASTM standards from their Web page in order to determine which
standard(s) apply to your situation. The site also includes a wealth of additional related
information.
 British Standards Institution
The British Standards Institution (BSI) is one of the world's leading standards and quality
services organizations. Formed in 1901 and incorporated under Royal Charter in 1929,
BSI is the oldest national standards-making body in the world. BSI works with
manufacturing and service industries, businesses and governments to facilitate the
production of British, European and international standards. You can search their
standards catalogue for free, see summary information after free registration, and access
complete standards with a paid subscription.
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 IEEE Standards
The IEEE produces over 1,300 standards relating to telecommunications, information
technology and power generation. You can search for information about these standards
at the IEEE site. If your library has a subscription to the IEEE Xplore database product,
you may also have access to the full text of most IEEE standards.
 ILI Standards Database
The ILI standards database is the leading bibliographic standards database. It covers
over 600,000 worldwide standards. Information given includes the Number, Title,
Version, Summary, International Equivalents, Table of Contents and more. Included
are the relevant EU "New Approach" Directives listing the standards required to attain
the CE Mark. Over 250 major Standards issuing authorities are covered, from the US,
Europe, the international bodies ISO and IEC to Japan and Australia. You can
purchase standards from ILI at the price of the document in your own currency. For a
growing number of documents you can directly download the standard over the Web in
PDF format. You local engineering library may or may not have a subscription to the
ILI service.
 ISO (International Organization for Standardization)
ISO is a network of the national standards institutes of 156 countries, on the basis of one
member per country, with a Central Secretariat in Geneva, Switzerland, that coordinates
the system. Their online catalogue is searchable and abstracts of found standards can
be displayed for free. You may order standards online.
 NISO (National Information Standards Organization)
NISO, the National Information Standards Organization, a non-profit association
accredited by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI), identifies, develops,
maintains, and publishes technical standards to manage information in our changing and
ever-more digital environment. NISO standards apply both traditional and new
technologies to the full range of information-related needs, including retrieval, repurposing, storage, metadata, and preservation. NISO standards are available online at
no cost in PDF format.
 NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology)
Founded in 1901, NIST is a non-regulatory federal agency within the U.S. Commerce
Department's Technology Administration. NIST's mission is to promote U.S. innovation
and industrial competitiveness by advancing measurement science, standards, and
technology in ways that enhance economic security and improve our quality of life.
Search their site for keywords plus the term ‘standard’ to locate standards. Results may
or may not be available online.
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 NSSN (originally, National Standards Systems Network)
NSSN is a cooperative partnership between the American National Standards Institute
(ANSI), U.S. private-sector standards organizations, government agencies, and
international standards organizations. NSSN's goal is to be a leader in the provision of
technical data and information about important developments in a global standardization
arena. Aligned with its standards developer partners, NSSN seamlessly routes users to
the commercial and regulatory technical documents they need. Searching is free; full text
requires payment to the issuing body. NSSN also offers a tracking and alerting service
(~$100 per year). NSSN service now contains information from more than 600 national,
foreign, regional and international bodies.
 WSSN (World Standards Services Network)
World Standards Services Network (WSSN), is a network of publicly accessible World
Wide Web servers of standards organizations around the world. Through the Web sites
of its members, WSSN provides information on international, regional and national
standardization and related activities and services. Their Structured Index – Catalogues
page provides links to a large number of international and national standards bodies.
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Technical Reports and Preprints
Technical
report literature forms a significant portion of the
information that engineers may find useful. Even so, different engineering
disciplines place varying amounts of emphasis on technical report literature.
For example, the computer science and aerospace areas produce far more
technical report literature than do the civil or systems areas.
Finding technical reports can sometimes be challenging. Again, some areas
provide good indexing of this material, while other areas may not. Reports
prepared at academic institutions may be well indexed within the institution
but not generally known outside—or not. And tech reports prepared for
industry may be completely proprietary and remain essentially invisible to
anyone not working inside the company that prepared it.
Nevertheless, there are a number of excellent resources available to you for
locating technical report literature.
NTIS – The National Technical Information Service
NTIS is perhaps one of the best known of all technical reports indexing
services. It is the largest central resource for government-funded scientific,
technical, engineering, and business related information available today.
Here you will find information on more than 600,000 information products
covering over 350 subject areas from over 200 federal agencies. NTIS also
makes available information and publications in audiovisual formats.
The free NTIS site is searchable for documents published since
1990. Many libraries also subscribe to versions of NTIS that are
searchable much farther back in time.
To view the actual documents identified, you will need to buy them (from
NTIS in any of several formats, including downloading), see if your home
library already has them in its collections, or obtain them on interlibrary
loan.
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NTRS – The NASA Technical Reports Server
The NASA Technical Reports Server is another well-known resource for
locating aerospace technical literature. The NASA Scientific and Technical
Information (STI) Program's mission is to collect, archive, and disseminate
NASA aerospace information, and locate domestic and international STI
pertinent to NASA's missions and Strategic Enterprises. Examples of
NASA's STI include research reports, journal articles, conference and
meeting papers, technical videos, mission-related operational documents,
and preliminary data. Many documents are not available online and must be
acquired via other means. Just over 900,000 records are currently in the
NTRS, including 7,600+ NACA reports.
Note, however, that records from the NASA Astrophysics Data
System are not in the current version of NTRS.
GrayLIT Network
So what is gray literature? The U.S. Interagency Gray Literature Working
Group defines gray literature as "…foreign or domestic open source material
that usually is available through specialized channels and may not enter
normal channels or systems of publication, distribution, bibliographic
control, or acquisition by booksellers or subscription agents." Another more
succinct definition is “Research reports that are not found in traditional peerreviewed publications.” (Swedish Council on Healthcare Assessment
Technology) The term can also be spelled “grey” or referred to as NCL—
Non-Conventional Literature.
In any case the GrayLIT Network provides a search engine for locating this
kind of material. It primarily searches the collections of the DOE, DTIC,
EPA and NASA, so there will be overlap with the search capabilities of
those organizations and the NTIS.
Other search engines for locating gray (or grey) literature in a more general
sense also exist. One way to keep up with the world of gray literature and
the ways to search for it is to track the efforts of the Grey Literature Network
Service--GreyNet. Their Web site offers considerable information about the
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world of gray literature and a listing by discipline of resources for locating
it.
arXiv.org e-Print Archive
Since 1991 the arXiv service and its predecessors have provided online
access to electronic versions of articles, preprints, and reports in the areas of
physics, mathematics, nonlinear sciences, computer science and quantitative
biology. arXiv.org currently contains over 350,000 papers. Some of these
papers may (and do) eventually find their way into peer-reviewed journals.
NCSTRL – Networked Computer Science Technical
Reference Library
NCSTRL (pronounced “ancestral”) is an international collection of
computer science technical reports from CS departments and industrial and
government research laboratories, made available for non-commercial and
educational use. It is a collaborative project involving NASA Langley, Old
Dominion University, the University of Virginia and Virginia Tech.
Virtual Technical Reports Center
The Virtual Technical Reports Center is a mammoth listing of institutions
that provide links to their technical reports literature. The VTRC is
maintained by Technical Reports Librarian Gloria Lyles Chawla at the
University of Maryland Library. The Institutions listed in the VTRC
provide either full-text reports, or searchable extended abstracts of their
technical reports on the World Wide Web. This site contains links to
technical reports, preprints, reprints, dissertations, theses, and research
reports of all kinds. Some metasites are listed by subject categories, as well
as by institution.
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Military Information
While much of the research done by the military is classified and
unavailable to the public, there are still many potentially useful reports and
papers that anyone can access. In addition, you may find yourself in the
position of needing to bid on a military contract or in need of a military
standard or regulation. This sort of information is usually available with a
modest amount of digging.
The Military Web
The NTIS (National Technical Information Service) database mentioned
earlier in this workbook is one place to search for technical literature
produced by or for the military. The NTIS database is a major resource for
locating U. S. Government sponsored research reports and studies in the
physical sciences, technology, engineering, biological sciences, medicine
and health sciences, agriculture and social sciences. Various classification
systems enhance subject retrieval. Material can also be searched by
corporate source, patent number and CAS registry number.
Just as you can use Firstgov to search the Web pages of other federal
agencies, you can also use this government search engine to search the
publicly available Web pages of the various branches of the military. At the
left side of the initial Firstgov screen, click on “Federal Executive” and then
navigate to the Department of Defense section, where you will find links to
the various service branches and defense agencies.
Note that the Department of Homeland Security is a completely
separate section of the Federal Executive pages—and that the U.
S. Coast Guard falls under its aegis rather than that of the other
branches of the military. Note that a number of other agencies of potential
interest to engineers also fall under the Homeland Security umbrella, e.g.
FEMA, the Transportation Security Administration and the Science and
Technology Directorate.
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Notice also on the left side of Firstgov’s screen the links in the “Reference
Center”. These include such useful links as “Data and Statistics”, “Laws
and Regulations”, “Libraries”, “Maps” and “Photos and Graphics”. The
Libraries link will take you to an extensive list that includes, among others,
the Corps of Engineers Library, the Engineer Research and Development
Center Professional Library, the Goddard Spaceflight Center Library, and
the NASA Headquarters Library in addition to a number of military libraries
and other pertinent government agencies.
The Laws and Regulations link will take you to an extensive listing of links
to resources on legal and regulatory topics.
The DefenseLINK Web page is a good one-stop shop for almost anything
military. You can focus your search on specific defense agencies or do a
global search throughout the entire .mil domain.
Notice the link on the right side of the page titled “Web Watch”.
This will take you to a handy graphical listing of major military
Web pages, neatly categorized by agency. Check out Edugate and
Regulations.gov as two interesting examples.
ASSIST—Acquisition Streamlining and Standardization Information
System is the place to look for information regarding military standards. To
use ASSIST, you will be asked to fill out a free registration form in order to
create a password and account. But if you anticipate needing to know a lot
about military standards, registering and using this Web site will be well
worth the time and effort. ASSIST also provides access to several other
kinds of data, including HAZMAT/ODC data.
You may also see mention of the Public STINET DODISS
database (Department of Defense Specifications and Standards
database). This tool is, in essence, a link back to the ASSIST
database. Copies of specifications and standards are available in PDF
format for downloading using a somewhat different user interface.
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The Defense Supply Center Columbus (DSCC) provides a comprehensive
collection of copies of documents for which DSCC is the technical agent or
preparing activity. A wide range of documents is available, including
specifications and standards, handbooks, and engineering drawings.
In addition to the above resources there is another military-oriented search
engine called SearchMil.com. SearchMil.com aggregates information from
over a million military-oriented Web pages and makes them available via its
search engine. Many of these pages are not “technical” in nature, but you
can find useful technical information there as well.
Note that Google provides a U.S. Government Topic-Specific
search option hidden near the bottom of its Advanced Search
page. This allows you to search within the .gov and .mil domains.
Finally, going to the library Web pages of one of the service academies or to
a site like the Dudley Knox Library of the Naval Postgraduate School
can lead you to many online help documents and guides to finding your way
through and to useful military information. Be aware that, like all other
educational institutions, there may be links on the page to resources that can
only be accessed by users associated with the Naval Postgraduate School—
but even so, sometimes just knowing that a resource exists can help you or
your own local librarians find ways to obtain the actual data you want.
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Teaching Aids, Demonstrations and
Images
Instructors
often have a need for demonstrations or images to
illustrate the concepts and processes they are teaching. Students need
supplemental tutorials and guides to help them understand complex material
or material peripheral to that discussed in the classroom. The advent of the
Internet has made a wealth of such material readily available online.
Teachers can use this material in their classes and students can study the
same illustrations over and over outside of class, thus reinforcing the
instruction they received in the classroom. Here are some resources for
finding this type of material.
The World Lecture Hall
Maintained at the University of Texas at Austin, the World Lecture Hall
publishes links to pages created by faculty worldwide who are using the
Web to deliver course materials in any language. Some courses are
delivered entirely over the Internet. Others are designed for students in
residence. Many fall somewhere in between. In all cases, they can be
visited by anyone interested in courseware on the Internet—faculty,
developers, and curious students alike.
When searching World Lecture Hall, it is not possible to search
the actual course content—only the course titles and components,
authors, and host institutions.
You can add a course of your own to the World Lecture Hall
using their online submission form.
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MIT World
MIT World is a free, open streaming media Web site of the most significant
public events at MIT. It features videos of the most recent speakers and
guests from across the campus and around the world. It is a project of the
Professional Education Programs at MIT's School of Engineering.
MIT OpenCourseWare
MIT’s OpenCourseWare site is a companion to the MIT World site above.
OCW is a large-scale, Web-based publication of the educational materials
from the MIT faculty's courses. This unique initiative enables the open
sharing of the MIT faculty's teaching materials with educators, enrolled
students, and self-learners around the world. OCW provides users with free
and open access to the syllabi, lecture notes, course calendars, problem sets
and solutions, exams, reading lists, even a selection of video lectures, from
1250 MIT courses representing 34 academic disciplines and all five of MIT's
schools. The initiative will include materials from 1800 courses by the year
2007.
The OCW home page provides a link to a list of similar sites
around the world.
MERLOT – Multimedia Educational Resource for
Learning and Online Teaching
MERLOT is a free and open resource designed primarily for faculty and
students of higher education. Links to online learning materials are collected
here along with annotations such as peer reviews and assignments. The
MERLOT community is made up of individual members and higher
education, institutional, and corporate partners and affiliates dedicated to
improving education. Individual MERLOT members support the community
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by contributing materials and adding assignments and comments to the
MERLOT collection. When you browse the collection or search for learning
materials, you will be able to go to a detailed view of the material in
MERLOT. This view tells you information about the learning material you
have found. The learning material itself will be located somewhere else on
the Internet; MERLOT only stores a description of it, plus any peer reviews,
member comments or assignments that instructors may have written to go
with it. If you find material in MERLOT that you might want to use for
yourself or in a class, all you need to do is go to the material's actual
location, check for any licensing regulations or costs involved with use, and
either add a link to the material to your course Web page, or email the URL
to students or others who might use it. You do not need to be a member of
MERLOT to find or use any materials listed in MERLOT. MERLOT also
has a federated search link to several other similar resources around the
world.
Image Searching
All the major Web search services offer image searching options. These
work essentially the same way that searching for any Web page works—type
in one or more keywords and click the search button. Typically, you are
retrieving either jpegs or gifs, those being the two most prevalent image
types associated with Web pages, though others such as bitmaps, tiffs and
pngs are sometimes available as well.
When searching for images, bear in mind that you are at the mercy of some
human being who assigned search terms to each picture. No Web search
engine can “look” at a picture as you do and “know” what it is about—it can
only match patterns of text assigned to an image and return those pictures
that have a particular label attached to them. So, if the human indexer didn’t
label the image properly or fully, you may not retrieve what you wanted or
expected.
Also keep in mind that there is a lot of risqué and pornographic imagery out
on the Web. Most search services allow you to filter out much of this kind
of material as you search—but clever and unscrupulous purveyors of porn
can and do attach “innocuous” terms to their sultry photos just to ensnare an
unsuspecting searcher. So despite your most careful efforts you may
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someday find yourself looking for something as bland as aluminum siding
and suddenly find a picture of something much more exciting!
You should also keep in mind that just because an image is available on the
Web doesn’t mean that it is free for the taking. Like text, images are
copyrighted by their photographers, creators and owners. You should not
use any image not in the public domain without checking with its owner to
determine whether you need to pay a royalty fee for its use. This is
particularly essential if you plan to use the image in a publication of your
own. At a bare minimum, you should always credit the source and/or
ownership of any image you use in a paper or lecture, including those that
belong to you—someone else viewing your presentation may want to use
your image!
To locate images that are in the public domain, do a standard Web search for
“public domain image” (without the quote marks) and you should turn up a
great many possible sources. You can narrow these down further by
including more specific terms, e.g. engineering or spacecraft or bridges.
Web Search Engines as Teaching Resource Locators
You can use all the standard Web search engines to locate demonstrations
and images in pretty much the same way you would use them to locate a
standard Web page. Type in the subject of interest—rocket nozzle design,
for example—and then include terms such as “tutorial” or “demonstration”
or “class” or “lecture” to weed out unwanted Web pages. Using the search
engine’s advanced search page may make this process a little easier—and
using the advanced search can also sometimes allow you to zero in on
certain types of file formats, e.g. Power Point files or multimedia files of
various sorts.
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The Engineer and Society: Ethics,
Economics and Sociology
Engineering ethics has always been an important aspect of both the
study and teaching of engineering disciplines and of the professional lives of
practicing engineers. Increasingly, engineering schools are integrating not
only the ethical aspects of engineering but also the economics and social
impacts of their subjects into their curricula. The Internet offers a wealth of
information on these topics and a number of ways to access that information.
The social, ethical and economic aspects of many engineering topics can to
some extent be found in the same journal and book indexes that are used for
regular subject searching. Often, however, if a student needs socioeconomic
or ethical information on a subject, he or she may also need to “think outside
the engineering box” more than might usually be the case. This means
venturing out into the humanities and social science worlds, where they will
need to use indexes and databases for subjects such as religion, philosophy,
business, economics, and sociology. Even indexes designed for general
topics may offer thought-provoking resources and different points of view
from those of engineering.
The resources listed here are “bare bones”—there are many others that might
be useful as well. You and your students would be well advised to consult
with your local librarians for additional suggestions and advice on good
places to look for this kind of information.
General Resources
Most general indexing and abstracting tools such as InfoTrac or Ebscohost
will afford some access to social, ethical and economic information.
General and special Web search engines will also. In addition, here are a
couple of other general resources of note;
Lexis-Nexis, if it is available at your institution, is a wonderful source of
full-text online information from both domestic and foreign newspapers and
news sources, TV news transcripts and other kinds of information.
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CQ Researcher is a lesser-known but very useful resource which may be
available on your campus. It provides in-depth “position papers” on a wide
variety of topics, many of them scientific or technical in nature, arguing all
sides of an issue and presenting a wealth of background information.
The Alternative Press Index and Ethnic Newswatch are two resources that
cover alternative, radical and left newspapers and magazines writing about
cultural, economic, political and social change. These resources are also
useful for gleaning information from the point of view of minority groups
and others often outside the mainstream press.
World News Connection provides information from thousands of foreign
media sources, including speeches, radio, television, newspapers,
periodicals, and books. It includes unclassified military, political,
environmental, sociological, scientific and technical data. All material has
been translated into English.
Ethics Resources
The Online Ethics Center for Engineering and Science offers a
reasonably comprehensive collection of documents and links of interest to a
wide variety of engineers and scientists. Topics include engineering
practice, research ethics, diversity issues, information technology issues,
codes of ethics, case studies, a glossary and more. There is something here
for everyone, faculty or student or practicing engineer.
The National Institute of Engineering Ethics (NIEE) is hosted by Texas
Tech University. The principal thrusts of the NIEE are education,
communication, program and project development, and practice applications
in the area of engineering ethics. A primary role of the Institute is to
encourage cooperation among individuals, universities, professional and
technical societies and business organizations with regard to engineering
ethics and professionalism issues. The NIEE offers a number of online
resources, movies, and links to additional information.
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The Web Clearinghouse for Engineering and Computing Ethics grew
out of a paper presented at the 1996 Frontiers in Education Conference, Salt
Lake City, Utah, November, 1996 by Joseph R. Herkert, Division of
Multidisciplinary Studies, North Carolina State University. This site links to
a large number of resources, including a particularly handy list of codes of
ethics developed by various engineering professional societies. Other
resources include links to the course syllabi of various universities, case
studies, and online books and journal articles on engineering ethics.
In addition to the above resources you may also want to troll through such
online databases as the ATLA Religion Database and the Philosopher’s
Index, if they are available at your institution. These resources do, in fact,
address issues of science and technology from the perspective of their
specialties.
Economics Resources
Information relating to the business and economics of engineering can reside
in a number of databases and Web pages. Again, consulting with your local
librarians will provide in-depth advice about how best to approach any topic
that requires an economic appraisal. However, here are some of the major
indexes that cover business and economic material.
ABI/Inform provides in-depth coverage of business conditions, trends,
corporate strategies and tactics, management techniques, competitive
product information, and a wide variety of other business topics. Users get
informative indexing and substantive abstracts to articles from 3,000 leading
business and management publications. ABI/Inform also provides fast, easy
access to information on almost 200,000 companies, with coverage from at
least 1992 forward and with backfile coverage to 1971.
Econlit, published by the American Economic Association, covers a wide
range of economics-related literature, both theoretical and applied. Some
topics include: business administration; economic development,
technological change, and growth; financial economics; industrial
organization; and mathematical and quantitative methods. Access to this
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database will vary according to which vendor is supplying the database to a
given school.
FACTIVA is a large business-oriented database that offers full-text access
to many journals, newspapers and other publications. FACTIVA is not the
easiest index in the world to learn to use, but its depth and breadth of
coverage make it worth the time and effort. It also includes a wealth of
company data and information, as well as photographs from the Reuters
News Agency.
Sociology Resources
The study of the social impacts of engineering is another area with a wide
variety of databases available, many of them outside the “traditional” areas
covered by engineering. Once again, your local librarians can offer valuable
advice and insights into which sociological resources may best meet your
needs.
Sociological Abstracts is probably the premiere indexing service in the field
of social science research. In addition to indexing over 1,800 journals, this
tool also includes book reviews and abstracts of books, book chapters,
dissertations and conference papers.
The Social Sciences Citation Index is a part of the broader Web of Science
database system. In addition to covering more than 1,700 leading social
sciences journals in a broad range of disciplines the SSCI offers the same
kind of citation and cited reference tracking that its sibling Science Citation
Index does.
Plagiarism
The term plagiarism derives from the Latin word for kidnapper. But instead
of stealing a person, those who plagiarize steal the words, ideas or creative
work of someone else without giving them proper credit. Unfortunately,
instances of plagiarism are all-too-common among college and university
students—and not unheard of among researchers and authors. There are
many reasons someone may plagiarize: lack of time, lack of initiative, lack
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of proper understanding of copyright and other legal rights, pressure to
succeed or get ahead, and downright dishonesty.
As a faculty member, it is up to you to set a good example and to explain to
students what is and is not acceptable behavior when preparing papers and
other kinds of scholarly work. Your school may already have Web pages
and other materials available to you and your students dealing with
plagiarism and how to avoid it, but should you need additional resources,
here are two that might prove useful.
The Plagiarism Resource Site
This set of Web pages is produced by Louis Bloomfield, a professor of
physics at the University of Virginia. His goal is to help reduce the impact
of plagiarism on education and educational institutions. Among other things
at the site, Prof. Bloomfield makes available software called WCopyfind that
can examine collections of text documents and search for matches between
and among them. Finding large amounts of shared material may indicate
copying between the documents.
Moss
Prof. Bloomfield links to a number of other sites containing information
about plagiarism, as well as to a variety of other kinds of software that may
be useful in discovering plagiarism. While he is most concerned about text
comparison, there are similar services available for comparing such things as
computer code. One of these that is freely available is called Moss—
Measure of Software Similarity. Moss can check C, C++, Java, C#,
Python, Visual Basic, Javascript, FORTRAN, ML, Haskell, Lisp, Scheme,
Pascal, Modula2, Ada, Perl, TCL, Matlab, VHDL, Verilog, Spice, MIPS
assembly, a8086 assembly, a8086 assembly, MIPS assembly, HCL2. It is
available free of charge.
Plagiarism Tutorial
There is an excellent online tutorial available from the Scholarly
Communication Center of the North Carolina State University Libraries on
66
the rules, regulations and laws regarding plagiarism in academic situations.
Although the tutorial is specifically designed for NCSU, it provides useful
information about plagiarism and copyright infringement that will apply to
students at any institution.
You can find many additional plagiarism resources using the Web search
engine of your choice—or consult your local librarian for assistance in either
finding resources or working with you to educate your students about their
ethical responsibilities.
67
Keeping Current
One of the greatest benefits of having so much information so
readily available over the Internet is also one of the biggest curses for any
researcher: how does one keep up with it all? These days it’s increasingly
hard to stay current with everything that is happening in your main field of
interest, let alone in any peripheral areas. Even so, the same technology that
creates the “problem” can also sometimes help to alleviate it.
Database Alerting Services
Most major bibliographic databases offer some kind of alerting service.
These usually include either a subject alert or a table-of-contents alert or
both. A subject alert allows you to set up one or more searches on topics of
interest and receive E-mail alerts at some set interval, often monthly, that
include all the new records entered into the database on that topic since your
last alert. A table-of-contents or TOC alert allows you to specify one or
more specific journals whose contents information is E-mailed to you every
time a new issue of the journal appears.
These days it is often the case that electronic TOC alerts appear
in your E-mailbox several days before the actual printed versions
of the journals appear on library shelves or in your U.S. mail.
Both versions of alert are easily set up, require minimal maintenance, and
are typically free. Your local engineering librarian will be happy to assist
you in how to set up such alerts. The process is similar across most
databases but there will be individual differences depending upon the
database and the vendor that supplies it. Once the process has been set in
motion, you need do little more except read the resulting E-mails to keep
aware of the latest publications in your fields of interest.
68
Publisher Alerting Services
Database vendors are not the only ones who provide alerting services. The
publishers of technical journals often provide the same service themselves,
particularly the major publishers such as Elsevier, Springer, Cambridge and
IEEE to name just a few. The services themselves work pretty much the
same way as they do with those of database vendors. You can set up both
subject alerts and TOC alerts for specific journals. Again, the alerting
service is typically free, though you or your local library will need to have a
subscription to the journal for you to actually read the contents of found
articles online. Otherwise, you will need to visit the library, resort to
interlibrary loan or use the publisher’s pay-per-view service, if one is
available.
Book Alerts
The various online book dealers all want a piece of the action, too, so you
can often set up alerts with them to be notified about new books in your
areas of interest. Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Borders all have
newsletters or other kinds of alerting services. For engineering and technical
books, however, your best commercial bet might be Powell’s Technical
Books and their E-mail newsletters (and even an RSS feed—see below).
This specialized book seller will help weed out non-technical books and
keep most of the non-book advertising to a minimum.
Society Alerting Services
Many of the major professional engineering societies now also offer alerting
services for their own publications. This is similar to what journal
publishers do but may include information about non-serial publications of
the societies in addition to TOCs or other information about their journals.
The ACM, AIAA, ASCE, ASME, IEEE, and SPIE all offer some kind of
alerting services, just to name a few such societies.
69
Web Alerts
These days it’s not just the commercial database vendors and journal
publishers that are getting into the alerting act. Many of the largest Web
search engines also now offer similar kinds of alerts for searches done across
their databases of Web pages. EEVL, GlobalSpec, Google, Science.gov,
and Yahoo! all offer various kinds of alerting services to let you know when
new Web pages or documents of interest have been added to their databases.
The EEVL engineering Web search engine maintains a listing of
current awareness tools of many kinds.
Other Ways to Stay Current and Organized
New ways to stay in touch with colleagues and keep up with what’s going
on in some field of interest keep appearing all the time, even as old ways
continue to flourish. Here is a potpourri of methods and tools you can use to
stay current and help organize the information you accumulate.
Listservs and Newsgroups
Listservs and newsgroups have been around since the early days of the
Internet. Both represent groups of people interested in a particular topic who
share their opinions and knowledge via E-mail messages or newsreading
software. Generally speaking, the difference between a listserv and a
newsgroup is that the former is moderated and is usually limited to
registered members of the group, while the latter is an open forum to which
anyone can post messages and read replies.
Joining a listserv can be an excellent way to ally oneself with a group of
like-minded colleagues with whom one can both share and obtain
information. There are listservs on just about any topic you can imagine.
How do you find out what those topics are? Two possibilities are Tile.Net /
70
Lists and CataList—the Official Catalog of Listserv Lists. Of the two
CataList seems to be somewhat more comprehensive.
For newsgroups the best way to discover a group of interest or to mine
existing archives of messages is probably to visit Google or Yahoo! and troll
through their newsgroup databases. Your ability to read and post to
newsgroups will depend upon the software installed on your computer, but
most mail reading software includes the ability to access and use
newsgroups.
Blogs
So what is a blog? The term is a shortening of the phrase “Web log”. It
refers to a Web site that gathers together on a continuing basis postings or
information about some particular topic. Blogs are generally moderated or
maintained by some individual who scours the Web looking for material that
matches the blog’s topic. You can think of a blog as something like an
electronic clipping service with the added feature that any reader of the blog
can append his or her thoughts to any of the entries.
Finding out about blogs in your area of interest is usually fairly easy. Again,
just go to Google and look for the blog search section—or you might try a
service called Bloglines.com, which also offers blog searching capabilities.
There are many other similar services.
Bloglines requires a free registration, after which you can begin to set up
your own collection of feeds from any of thousands of sources. You can
organize these by topic, share articles of interest with others, or even set up a
blog of your own. The hardest thing may be nailing down exactly which
feeds you want to read regularly. A small pop-up window in your
computer’s system tray will alert you to new postings from any of the feeds
you choose. Bloglines also offers nifty little extras like package tracking
and weather forecasts.
Setting up a blog may be a smart way for you and your research
group or students to create a shared resource of information about
some topic of interest or a current project. All members of the
group can contribute and comment on any items included in your blog.
71
RSS Feeds
RSS feeds are something like blogs on steroids. RSS stands for (take your
pick) Rich Site Summary, RDF Site Summary, or Really Simple
Syndication. In any case RSS is a means of distributing and receiving news
headlines and other content over the Web without having to visit Web sites
directly. RSS is an active medium—the information is constantly being
gathered and updated. By using the Live Bookmarks feature in the free
Firefox browser, My Yahoo, or a wide array of free downloadable software,
you can tap into RSS feeds and browse headline-style content from your
favorite sites quickly and easily. Or you can use Bloglines (see above) as
your RSS reader as well, if you don’t want to install RSS software. After
that all you have to do is sit back and read the blurbs and information that
come to you. RSS may be almost the best way to stay abreast of the very
latest information in a field—but like all these services, reading the feeds
can consume a lot of time.
Wikis
The term “wiki” comes from the Hawaiian phrase “wiki wiki” meaning
rapidly or quickly. (Some people think it also may stand for the phrase
“What I Know Is”.) In any case, a wiki is a kind of Web site that allows
users to easily add and edit the contents of its pages. Wikis are especially
suited to collaborative work in which all members of a group contribute to
the whole of the site or document. The wiki software keeps track of changes
and a page can be reverted to any of its previous states. Some wiki software
allows for easy discussion and consensus building among the site’s authors.
But a wiki’s strength can also be its greatest weakness: since anyone can
add to or change information on a page, it is easy for erroneous information
to be added. There is no (or little) editorial control and often no one in
authority keeping an eye on the site’s content. Still, it may be a useful and
clever way for persons working as a group to create and share knowledge
and a record of their work.
The most prominent wiki is probably the Wikipedia, an everincreasing online encyclopedia being created by its users based
on their own expertise and knowledge.
72
Bibliographic Management Tools
Keeping up with all the citations and Web pages you accumulate can be a
daunting task. Fortunately, there are several ways to do this. Many schools
and libraries now offer access to one or more of the major commercial
citation managers:
EndNote, ProCite, Reference Manager, and
RefWorks. Each of these has advantages and disadvantages but all of them
require some kind of fee or subscription. Your institution may or may not
foot the bill for one of them while you are affiliated with the school. If you
leave the school, you lose your “free” access but you probably can continue
to maintain your database of citations by paying a fee on your own, if you
wish to.
Citation managers have the ability not only to store and organize your
references, they can also assist you in properly formatting references and
footnotes for publication. The software maintains hundreds of templates for
common style guides (e.g. APA, Chicago Manual of Style, Turabian, etc.)
and for the guidelines for specific publishers (e.g. Elsevier, Cambridge,
IEEE, etc.) Once you have assembled your bibliography of references, just
tell your software which guide to use and it will correctly format your
bibliography according to that style. Used in conjunction with word
processing software like MS Word, your manager may even be able to
format and insert footnotes and endnotes for you. If you are working as part
of a research group or design team, most of these tools also allow you to set
up shared resource folders so that all members of the team can save citation
information and view the aggregated information.
What if you don’t have access to a commercial product and don’t want to
pay for one yourself? Are there alternatives? Yes, there are free and almostfree alternatives available on the Web.
Some of these include
BiblioExpress, Bibliography Builder, and Scholar’s Aid Lite. While
these are free and freely available, the “price” you may pay is a decrease in
functionality and scope. The choice is yours.
73
URL Sharing Software
The big commercial citation managers mentioned above often allow citation
sharing among groups but the software carries a hefty price tag. And what
about Web sites? Is there a way to share “bibliographies” of Web addresses
among friends and coworkers? The answer is yes! Looksmart’s Furl,
del.icio.us and Connotea are three free Web services that allow you to
create and maintain lists of Web pages and other items that you can then
make available to friends and colleagues.
Furl is a free service that saves the important items you find on the Web and
enables you to quickly find them again. Furl archives a personal copy of
every page you save. When you want to recall it, you can find it instantly by
searching the full text of your archived items. Each Furl member has a
personal archive of 5 gigabytes, large enough to store tens of thousands of
searchable items. Furl can also recommend new Web pages that may
interest you, guided by the sites you've already "Furled" or saved. Furl also
offers ways to share the content you find on the Web. You can send a daily
E-mail newsletter of links to friends and colleagues, use Furl to generate
RSS feeds for your links, or integrate them quickly and easily into an
existing Web site.
Del.icio.us (despite its cutesy name) offers you a way to save and share with
others your list of “favorites” via the Web. In other words, you are storing a
list of bookmarked URLs, not entire files or Web pages. The advantage is
that your favorites list becomes available from any computer anywhere,
rather than being tied to a single machine in your office or home. And you
can make this favorites list available to friends and colleagues, so that they
can share among themselves irrespective of where they or their “home”
computers are located.
Connotea, developed by the Nature Publishing Group, is another similar link
and reference sharing service which is based on the Del.icio.us model but
enhanced and optimized for use by scientists. Connotea (pronounced KONno-tee-ah) allows you to save links to any online content, making it easy to
store your entire collection of reference materials in one place by simply
74
saving links to them. In addition, Connotea recognizes links to certain Web
sites, and automatically collects the bibliographic information for the article
or book that is being linked to. You can organize your collection of
references and Web sites by simply assigning tags (which you can think of
as categories or labels) to the links you've saved. You can assign as many
tags as you want to a bookmark, and they can be almost anything you like,
including phrases. Storing your links online, and organizing them with
simple tags, leads to interesting possibilities for discovering new content that
is relevant to your interests. Of the free online reference managers
mentioned here, Connotea is probably most like a fee-based reference
management tool and offers the most flexibility in terms of the kinds of
things you can reference and share.
75
A Knowledge Tool
The next several pages present a Knowledge Tool template based on
a hypothetical university engineering class dealing with nanoscience and
technology. Many libraries make similar documents available to their
faculty and students as web pages known as Subject Guides, Pathfinders or
similar titles. There is, however, no reason you can’t create such documents
for your own classes or students. These can be as general or as detailed as
you wish or as circumstances warrant. The example below tries to include
many of the resource categories discussed in this workbook. Use it as a
guide—but don’t feel that you must include every category in each
Knowledge Tool you create! The goal is to help your students know where
to look for the kinds of information you deem most important for their
research and projects—and in doing so help them to produce papers and
projects of higher quality.
You are encouraged to consult with your own librarians when
designing your Knowledge Tools, as they will know which resources are
available locally. They will also be able to suggest other useful resources
that may not have been mentioned in this workbook but which will also be
of value to you and your students.
76
University of Greater Knowledge
College Station, Solid State
A Knowledge Tool for
ENGR 100: Introduction to Nanoscience Topics
Spring 2006
Databases – Journal Articles
Try these resources first…
Additional resources…
Ei Compendex
Best general engineering index for all areas of
research.
Inspec
Comprehensive database for electrical
engineering, computer science, and physics.
Cambridge Scientific Abstracts
Select the Technology subject area to search
multiple databases simultaneously.
Medline or Pubmed
Excellent database for biomedical engineering
research topics.
IEEE Xplore
Access to all IEEE Transaction journals and
conference proceedings.
SciFinder Scholar
Premiere database for chemistry and chemical
engineering topics.
Web of Science
Multiple subject areas; useful for citation
searching and analysis.
Newspapers and Magazines
InfoTrac OneFile
Good source for general news and periodical
articles on a wide range of topics.
Lexis-Nexis
Full-text news sources as well as information
on companies, industries, markets,
government and politics.
Factiva
Particularly good for news accounts; coverage
of foreign papers is in the country’s language;
also good source of photos and illustrations.
Books
Know-It-All (The UGK Catalog)
Information on millions of books, journals, and
other items held in the University of Greater
Knowledge libraries.
Leonardo (Linda Hall Library of Science,
Engineering and Technology)
Link to a specialized scientific library catalog.
Libweb—Library WWW Servers
Links to library catalogs at other schools
around the country and the world.
RedLightGreen
Information on over 130 million books for
education and research; designed for
undergraduate research.
Powell’s Technical Books
Excellent online bookstore specializing in
scientific and technical materials.
Searching the Web
General
Specialized
Google Advanced Search
Use the advanced search screen to increase
specificity and minimize unwanted material.
EEVL
Good search engine devoted to engineering,
mathematics and computer science sites.
Ixquick
Use this metasearch engine to simultaneously
access ten search engines and directories.
GlobalSpec
Search engine for engineering resources; be
sure to change to “The Engineering Web”
before entering search.
See Evaluating Web Resources for tips on
“reading” web sites.
Scirus
Excellent search engine for scientific and
technical web pages and articles from Elsevier
publications.
Infomine
A virtual library of Internet resources relevant to
faculty, students, and research staff at the
university level.
78
Reference Resources
ENGnetBASE
Over 400 online, fully searchable handbooks
and reference works useful for locating facts
and data.
Knovel Interactive Library
Over 650 reference titles from leading
publishers; Productivity Tools allow you to
manipulate data, plot graphs, and perform
“what-if?” experiments.
Government Resources
Science.gov
National Nanotechnology Initiative
Specialty search engine for locating web
The multiagency coordinator for federal
pages produced by U.S. federal government
nanotech R&D.
agencies with scientific and technical missions.
US Patent and Trademark Office
Defense Technical Information Center
Database for searching patents issued by the
A search engine for unclassified Department of U.S. government.
Defense science and technology material.
European Patent Office
Database on over 59 million patents issued by
72 countries worldwide; searchable via the
esp@cenet system.
Standards
NSSN (National Standards Systems
Network)
Search for standards from over 600 national,
foreign, regional and international bodies.
Annual Book of ASTM Standards
Located in the Engineering Library reference
collection (TA401.A653); information on over
12,000 standards.
Technical Reports
NTIS (National Technical Information
Service)
Information on over 600,000 information
products funded by over 200 U.S. federal
agencies.
Virtual Technical Reports Center
Links to institutional repositories of technical
reports available via the World Wide Web.
79
Demonstrations
ENGR100 Class Demonstrations
Links to the demonstrations and online
experiments used in class.
MIT OpenCourseWare Project
Links to MIT’s freely available class notes and
demonstrations; search for “nanoscience” to
find relevant materials.
Google Image Search
Use this resource to locate images for class
projects and papers; obtain permissions for
any copyrighted materials!
Social, Ethical and Economic Considerations
Online Ethics Center for Engineering and
Science
Use to find background material on the ethics
and societal implications of nanoscience and
nanotechnology for your term papers.
FACTIVA
Good source for locating articles and
information about the business aspects of
nanoscience and nanotechnology.
How to Avoid Plagiarism
UGK Library guide on how to cite materials
properly in your papers and avoid the risk of
plagiarism.
Citation Information
Connotea
Use this online reference sharing service to help you organize and keep track of journal articles
and other materials you collect in support of your class projects.
Contact Information
Instructor Name and Contact Information Would Be Included Here
80
Links to Resources
Below are links to the resources mentioned in the text of this workbook.
All were
working at the time of printing. Certain fee-based databases and search services do not show
link addresses, as these will vary from library to library. Please check with your local librarians
for information about these resources.
Finding Journal Articles
Most major databases are available only on a subscription basis. You should check with your local library to
see which databases and which vendors are available to you at your home institution. A few exceptions are
noted below:
ASCE Publications CE Database
(http://www.pubs.asce.org/cedbsrch.html)
ACS Free Search
(http://pubs.acs.org/wls/journals/query/subscriberSearch.html)
CiteSeer
(http://liinwww.ira.uka.de/bibliography/Misc/CiteSeer/)
DOE Information Bridge
(http://www.doe.gov/bridge/)
Energy Citations Database
(http://www.osti.gov/energycitations/)
EnergyFiles
(http://www.osti.gov/energyfiles/)
ETDEWEB
(http://www.etde.org/ETDEWEB/)
INIS Database
(http://www.iaea.org/inis/inisdb.htm)
NASA Scientific and Aerospace Technical Reports
(http://www.sti.nasa.gov/Pubs/star/Star.html)
OSTI Information Bridge
(http://www.osti.gov/)
Public STINET
(http://stinet.dtic.mil/)
PubMed
(http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi)
SAE Publications Search
(http://www.sae.org/jsp/jsps/advancesearch.jsp)
81
Scitation
(http://scitation.aip.org/)
TLCat—Transportation Union Catalog
(http://ntl.bts.gov/link.html)
Transportation Research Board Publications Index
(http://pubsindex.trb.org/)
TRIS Online
(http://trisonline.bts.gov/search.cfm)
Finding Books
Amazon.com
(http://www.amazon.com)
Barnes & Noble.com
(http://www.barnesandnoble.com/)
Bibliotheque Nationale
(http://www.bnf.fr/pages/catalogues.htm)
Bookfinder.com
(http://www.bookfinder.com/)
British Library Catalogues
(http://www.bl.uk/catalogues/toppage.html)
Canada Institute for Scientific and Technical Information Catalogue
(http://cat.cisti.nrc.ca/)
CATNYP – New York Public Library – Science, Industry and Business
(http://catnyp.nypl.org/)
Center for Research Libraries Online Catalog
(http://catalog.crl.edu/)
German National Library of Science and Technology
(http://tib-hannover.de/en/catalogues/)
Library of Chinese Academy of Sciences
(http://www.las.ac.cn:90/index_en.asp)
Library of Congress (United States)
(http://www.loc.gov/index.html)
Libweb—Library WWW Servers
(http://lists.webjunction.org/libweb/)
Linda Hall Library of Science, Engineering and Technology
(http://www.lhl.lib.mo.us/)
North Carolina State University Libraries Online Catalog
(http://www.lib.ncsu.edu/catalog/)
Open WorldCat (OCLC)
(http://www.oclc.org/worldcat/open/tryit/default.htm)
Powell’s Technical Books
(http://www.powells.com/technicalbooks)
RedLightGreen
(http://www.redlightgreen.com/ucwprod/web/workspace.jsp)
82
Voyager Online Catalog – Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University
(http://voyager.db.erau.edu/)
Reference Books
eFunda Engineering Fundamentals
(http://www.efunda.com/home.cfm)
ENGnetBASE
(Check with your local library for availability)
ENVIROnetBASE
(Check with your local library for availability)
Knovel Interactive Library
(Check with your local library for availability)
MATHnetBASE
(Check with your local library for availability)
McGraw-Hill Digital Engineering Library
(Check with your local library for availability)
Safari Tech Books Online
(Check with your local library for availability)
Web Searching
Athenus
(http://www.athenus.com/)
BUBL Information Service
(http://www.bubl.ac.uk/)
Clusty
(http://clusty.com/)
Dogpile
(http://www.dogpile.com/)
EEVL
(http://www.eevl.ac.uk/)
Globalspec
(http://www.globalspec.com/)
Google
(http://www.google.com/)
Google Scholar
(http://scholar.google.com/)
Grokker
(http://www.grokker.com/)
Infomine—Scholarly Internet Resource Collections
(http://infomine.ucr.edu/)
83
Ixquick
(http://www.us.ixquick.com/)
KartOO
(http://www.kartoo.com/)
Librarians’ Internet Index
(http://www.lii.org/)
Mooter
(http://www.mooter.com/)
MSN Search
(http://search.msn.com/)
Pinakes—a Subject Launchpad
(http://www.hw.ac.uk/libWWW/irn/pinakes/pinakes.html)
Scirus
(http://www.scirus.com/srsapp/)
Scout Report Archives
(http://scout.wisc.edu/Archives/index.php)
Teoma [now called Ask.com]
(http://search.ask.com/)
WWW Virtual Library—Engineering
(http://vlib.org/Engineering)
Yahoo! Search
(http://search.yahoo.com/)
Information Quality WWW Virtual Library
(http://www.vuw.ac.nz/staff/alastair_smith/evaln/evaln.htm)
Government Information
DOE Information Bridge
(http://www.osti.gov/bridge/basicsearch.jsp)
DTIC—Defense Technical Information Center
(http://www.dtic.mil/dtic/)
Energy Citations Database
(http://www.osti.gov/energycitations/)
EPA Information Sources
(http://www.epa.gov/epahome/resource.htm)
NASA Scientific and Aerospace Technical Reports
(http://www.sti.nasa.gov/Pubs/star/Star.html)
NASA Technical Reports Server
(http://ntrs.nasa.gov/)
National Transportation Library
(http://ntl.bts.gov/)
OSTI Information Bridge
(http://www.osti.gov/)
84
Science.gov—Firstgov for Science
(http://www.science.gov/)
TRIS Online
(http://trisonline.bts.gov/search.cfm)
Patents, Trademarks and Copyright
Copyright and the University Community (University of Texas)
(http://www.utsystem.edu/ogc/Intellectualproperty/admin3.htm)
Copyright Information Resources (University of Virginia Libraries)
(http://www.lib.virginia.edu/acquisitions/copyright/)
Creative Commons
(http://creativecommons.org/)
Science Commons
(http://sciencecommons.org/)
European Patent Office—esp@cenet Portal
(http://www.espacenet.com/)
Issues in Scholarly Information (University of Virginia Libraries)
(http://www.lib.virginia.edu/scholcomm.html)
Patent Searching—Tutorial and Guide to Online Resources and Information (University of Texas)
(http://www.lib.utexas.edu/engin/patent-tutorial/index.htm)
TESS—Trademark Electronic Search System
(http://tess2.uspto.gov/bin/gate.exe?f=login&p_lang=english&p_d=trmk)
USPTO Patents Database
(http://www.uspto.gov/patft/index.html)
Patent Alert
(http://www.patentalert.com/)
Web Based Patent Searching Tutorial (Univ. California at San Diego)
(http://scilib.ucsd.edu/howto/guides/patsearch/index.html)
Standards
ANSI—American National Standards Institute
(http://www.ansi.org/)
ASTM—American Society for Testing and Materials
(http://www.astm.org/)
BSI—British Standards Institution
(http://www.bsi-global.com/index.xalter)
IEEE—Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers
(http://www.ieee.org/portal/site)
ILI
(http://www.ili.co.uk/)
85
ISO—International Organization for Standardization
(http://www.iso.org/iso/en/ISOOnline.frontpage)
NISO—National Information Standards Organization
(http://www.niso.org/)
NIST—National Institute of Standards and Technology
(http://www.nist.gov/)
NSSN (originally, National Standards Systems Network)
(http://www.nssn.org/)
WSSN—World Standards Services Network
(http://www.wssn.net/WSSN/index.html)
Technical Reports and Preprints
arXiv.org
(http://arxiv.org/)
GrayLIT Network
(http://www.osti.gov/graylit/)
GreyNet—Grey Literature Network Service
(http://www.greynet.org/pages/1/index.htm)
NCSTRL—Networked Computer Science Technical Reference Library
(http://www.ncstrl.org/)
NTIS—National Technical Information Service
(http://www.ntis.gov/)
NTRS—NASA Technical Reports Server
(http://ntrs.nasa.gov/)
Virtual Technical Reports Center
(http://www.lib.umd.edu/ENGIN/TechReports/Virtual-TechReports.html)
Military Information
ASSIST—Acquisition Streamlining and Standardization Information System
(http://assist.daps.dla.mil/online/start/)
DefenseLINK Search
(http://www.defenselink.mil/search/)
Defense Supply Center Columbus
(http://www.dscc.dla.mil/)
Dudley Knox Library of the Naval Postgraduate School
(http://library.nps.navy.mil/home/militaryinfo.htm)
Edugate
(https://ca.dtic.mil/edugate/)
Firstgov
(http://www.firstgov.gov/)
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NTIS—National Technical Information Service
(http://www.ntis.gov/)
Public STINET
(http://stinet.dtic.mil/)
Regulations.gov
(http://www.regulations.gov/fdmspublic/component/main)
SearchMil.com
(http://www.searchmil.com/)
Teaching Aids, Demonstrations and Images
World Lecture Hall
(http://web.austin.utexas.edu/wlh/index.cfm)
MIT World
(http://mitworld.mit.edu/index.php)
MIT OpenCourseWare
(http://ocw.mit.edu/index.html)
MERLOT
(http://www.merlot.org/Home.po)
Google Image Search
(http://www.google.com/imghp?hl=en&tab=wi)
Engineer and Society: Ethics, Economics and Sociology
Lexis-Nexis
(Check with your local library for availability)
CQ Researcher
(Check with your local library for availability)
Alternative Press Index
(Check with your local library for availability)
Ethnic Newswatch
(Check with your local library for availability)
World News Connection
(Check with your local library for availability)
Online Ethics Center for Engineering and Science
(http://onlineethics.org/)
National Institute of Engineering Ethics
(http://www.murdough.ttu.edu/pd.cfm?pt=NIEE)
Web Clearinghouse for Engineering and Computing Ethics
(http://www4.ncsu.edu/~jherkert/ethicind.html)
ATLA Religion Database
(Check with your local library for availability)
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Philosopher’s Index
(Check with your local library for availability)
ABI/Inform
(Check with your local library for availability)
Econlit
(Check with your local library for availability)
FACTIVA
(Check with your local library for availability)
Sociological Abstracts
(Check with your local library for availability)
Social Sciences Citation Index
(Check with your local library for availability)
Plagiarism Resource Site
(http://plagiarism.phys.virginia.edu/)
MOSS—Measure of Software Similarity
(http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~aiken/moss.html)
Plagiarism Tutorial (North Carolina State University)
(http://www.lib.ncsu.edu/scc/tutorial/index.html)
Keeping Current
Check with your local librarians about setting up database, publisher, society or other kinds of
alerts, if you have questions or problems.
Powell’s Technical Books
(http://www.powells.com/technicalbooks)
Current Awareness Services for Engineering, Mathematics and Computing
(http://www.eevl.ac.uk/current_awareness_services.html)
Tile.net / Lists
(http://www.tile.net/lists/)
CataList—the Official Catalog of LISTSERV Lists
(http://www.lsoft.com/catalist.html)
Bloglines
(http://www.bloglines.com/)
Wikipedia
(http://www.wikipedia.org/)
BiblioExpress
(http://www.biblioscape.com/biblioexpress.htm)
Bibliography Builder
(http://www.ecf.toronto.edu/~writing/bb.html)
Scholars’s Aid Lite
(http://www.scholarsaid.com/)
Looksmart’s Furl
(http://www.furl.net/)
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del.icio.us
(http://del.icio.us/)
Connotea
(http://www.connotea.org/)
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