When you have a specific assignment, you need to do focused research on materials, components, and the state of the art as evolved by others. Most of this you do in libraries.
Locations
There is an enormous range of libraries accessible to you if you will use them. These include:
- Your own collection
- Your colleagues' collections
- Your company's library
- University and technical school libraries
- The technical room of your public library
- Specialized libraries in technical societies and other institutions
- Government agency and laboratory libraries
Your marketers and salespeople are the G2 (intelligence, in the military sense) of your company and are probably eager to help you. Furthermore, you can make some success points with them if you tell them what you have learned about a competitor in a trade show or technical meeting and give them some catalogs you have picked up for their library.
Contents
Libraries contain the following kinds of material:
- Reference books.
- Purchasing directories.
- Textbooks.
- Encyclopedias.
- Periodicals.
- Videotapes.
- A wide variety of materials such as photograph collections, theses, monographs, etc.
- Computer terminals with access to computer databases all over the United States.
- Collections of abstracts of technical papers.
- Indexes referring you to other publications such as Readers' Guide to Periodical Literature and Engineering Index.
- References to foreign publications and translation services. The development of foreign countries in the past two decades makes this an increasingly important class of sources.
Patent Office Search Room
There is a unique library in the United States which is sadly neglected by design engineers. It is the U.S. Patent Office search room in Washington. In it are copies of all United States patents, filed and cross-filed in accordance with an elaborate but easily understood manual of classification. The stacks are open to the public, and there are even special fixtures on the reading-room tables to help you manipulate the patent copies. There is a staff of highly trained and cooperative librarians whose sole function is to help you find the patents you are seeking.
Why is this library useful to design engineers as well as to the patent searchers who are its principal users? The theory of the United States patent system is that the government exchanges a limited monopoly to inventors in exchange for their teaching the public the art which they have invented. This teaching takes place in the specifications of their patents, and if they do not make a thorough disclosure of their new art, their patents are invalid. These patents are a mine of ideas, many never exploited in the marketplace for reasons unrelated to technical merit. They are there for you to learn from.
A trip to the Patent Office requires cash expenditure by your company over and above your own salary. It must be sold to your management.
Librarians
A major asset of a library is its librarians. It is not the primary function of a librarian to look stern and say "Shhh." Librarians get their job satisfaction from helping you find material, and they get the same feeling of pleasure in making a search hit as you do in coming up with a good idea. They are professionally trained, have college degrees in library science, and have incredible amounts of knowledge of what material there is, where it is, and how to get it. They can arrange for you to visit other libraries and to borrow material from them. Some librarians will help you build a bibliography in the subject of interest to you. Librarians are eager to help and enormously helpful; use them!
An online search is the querying of a database by a computer and the printing out of those items in the database which are called for by the querying computer. Such database searches are provided by some libraries and may be available through your own company computers. For example, among the data bases which can be accessed is Engineering Index.
The databases in and through your own personal computer are a part of your library.
Your Personal Library
You will build your personal library throughout your career. If you do a particularly good job, it will enhance your reputation; others will consult you and thus contribute to your success in a second way.
Many commercial catalogs are sources of technical information as well as the vendors' product data. They are usefully filed among textbooks and copies of technical papers. For this reason they are most usefully filed by subject rather than by manufacturer's name. It may be desirable to secure two or more copies of a catalog or to cut up a catalog in order to file each portion of the material in the appropriate subject location.
A most useful piece of library hardware is the document box. It is a cardboard box about 9 by 12 by 3 in into which you place booklets, clippings, etc., which are not self-supporting like a book. Adhesive labels identify the contents.
If you are a disciplined and organized labeler, the standard Pendaflex file permits very fine subdivision with easy access of your reference papers and record papers. Some people build libraries of clippings and materials they might use someday. Some people save technical journals.
Technology Museums
There are technology museums in the United States and Europe which provide a fascinating presentation of the history of technology and great exercise for the visitors' imagination. You can spend useful hours in front of their exhibits imagining the mental processes of the designers, limited by the knowledge and facilities they then had, to understand why they made the designs they did.
