Engineer's Guide to the Library

Engineers, both in industry and academia, are engaged in an ongoing conversation about engineering and related topics, sharing their discoveries about the best ways to solve problems. This conversation has been going on for many years, and being able to join the conversation is an important skill for an engineer.  At first your role in the conversation will be primarily passive, discovering what others have said on a topic, but soon you will be actively contributing and sharing your own discoveries with others. Even the papers you write in school are a part of the conversation.

To get the most out of the conversation, it helps to be aware of the different ways researchers and engineers share their work, so you will have some idea of what kinds of resources you should be looking for, and can recognize and understand what you find. Depending about what information you need for your work, any of the resource types listed below may be appropriate.

This list of resource types is not exhaustive, and concentrates on the parts of the conversation the library is able to capture and make available. A lot of the conversation in engineering is informal, and these more casual exchanges are generally not accessible through the library.