State of the Art Survey of Reference Sources in Engineering Available to Purchase

For many engineering librarians, a most welcome event during the year under review was the publication of Professor Ching‐Chih Chen's Scientific and Technical Information Sources (the MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1977). Making use of her extensive knowledge and experience in the field, Ms. Chen has come out with an up‐to‐date and reliable reference source for scientists and engineers. Conventional as well as nonconventional sources of information are listed in this guide which cites nearly 3,700 titles, grouped in 23 categories. A matter of special interest to librarians is that the book generously provides review sources from library and scientific literature for most entries. Any librarian without a sci‐tech background should be able to make use of the volume for obtaining a working knowledge of his or her field. This is all the more important in an area like engineering, which is continually being extended by the addition of new interdisciplinary fields. This development is symbolized by the phenomenal growth in technical vocabulary not ordinarily defined in conventional lexicographic aids. This trend as well as the increasing use of electronic data bases for literature retrieval has stimulated the need for new as well as revised dictionaries and thesauri without which one cannot formulate a workable search strategy. Mercifully for librarians the supply of these basic sources is keeping pace with the demand. Some of the new and revised dictionaries are reviewed in detail elsewhere in this survey, but we mention here a few more to prove the point. These include The Condensed Chemical Dictionary, 9th ed., rev. by Gessner G. Hawley, New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1978; Glossary of Terms in Thermal Soil Mechanics by Alfreds R. Jumikis, Piscataway, N.J.: The State University of New Jersey, College of Engineering, 1977; Hydrographic Dictionary, 3d ed., Monte Carlo, International Hydrographic Organisation, 1977; The Pipeline Glossary and Directory, Beaconsfield, Bucks. Eng., Scientific Surveys Ltd., 1978; Modern Dictionary of Electronics, 5th ed., Rudolf F. Graf, Indianapolis, 1977; and Transportation‐Logistics Dictionary by Wallace Little, Washington, D.C., Traffic Service Corp., 1977. It is this writer's belief that the trend towards specialized subject dictionaries and thesauri will continue to grow for some time to come.