A Guide to Writing as an Engineer, 4th Edition

8

ACCESSING ENGINEERING INFORMATION

If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.

Sir Isaac Newton, 1642–1727.

Salmon data storage

Engineers at the National Tsing Hua University in Taiwan and the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany have created a “write-once-read-many-times” memory device that combines electrodes, silver nanoparticles, and salmon DNA, the last of which could turn out to be less expensive than traditional inorganic materials such as silicon.

For details, see the Preface for the URL.

Scientific information is growing at breakneck speed—according to some doubling every two or three years—and so are the electronic pathways to this knowledge. The information explosion is now a constant state of affairs for engineers.

Even if you work in a highly specialized field as these engineers do, you may need to access information from fields other than your own. To support you in that effort, this chapter explores engineering information resources available for your reference and research.¹

BASIC SEARCH STRATEGIES

Before setting out for the library or opening your favorite web search engine, know some strategies for planning and getting the most out of your search.

PREPARING FOR THE SEARCH

Although books and journals are still important sources of information (and are usually what we associate with the traditional library), they are no longer the only sources we use. The twenty-first century library is a hybrid of print and electronic resources. ...