t = $$$ 2

[nbucska]

HELP ! Our time is being wasted.<br><br>1.) Technical magazines try to force us to read them all so they omit page numbering, abrigde indices, omit highlighting and format the articles to be hard to scan.<br><br>2.) There should be non-profit technical WEB-sites per profession/ technology, so a search for a radio frequency transistor won't suggest St. Jerome's letter to the pope<br>in the 4th century.<br><br>I think we, engineers can force the industry not to waste our time . Any suggestion, how ?<br>&lt;<A HREF="mailto:nbucska@pcperipherals.com">nbucska@pcperipherals.com</A>&gt;

 

[Troy]

I would love to see a discipline based web site that had a huge repository of technical articles, journals and reviews that would be searchable by keyword, idea or by user definable criteria. <br><br>As far as I am concerned, publishers of technical material should have all their complete works on-line, fully searchable. When you think about it, many of the papers that are submitted are most likely submitted in an electronic format anyway. <br><br>These sites would not only benefit professionals, but anyone interested in learning new things. I would probably read articles from other engineering disciplines to see how they do things, or simply because the articles sound interesting.<br><br>Well that is my two cents,<br><br>Troy <p>Troy Williams<br><a href=mailto:fenris@hotmail.com>fenris@hotmail.com</a><br><a href= > </a><br>I am a recent Mining Engineering Graduate with an interest in Genetic Algorithms, Engineering and Computers and Programming.

 

[louis]

Some refereed journals have put their magazines on line, but you must subscribe to them.&nbsp;&nbsp;Publication of a good journal is expensive with a limited readership.&nbsp;&nbsp;It is a time and quality equal money problem.<br><br>For industrial journals, I get many free subscriptions.&nbsp;&nbsp;The publisher makes their money from the advertisements.&nbsp;&nbsp;To avoid wasting your time, I suggest being selective. I have not been selective enough.&nbsp;&nbsp;If the magazine is of poor quality, cancel your subscription even if free.<br><br>I believe that <u>information services is the upcoming thing.</u>&nbsp;&nbsp;One such company will conduct literature searches (title, abstract), provide tables of contents of journals or magazines, and notify you of anything that matches your interest.&nbsp;&nbsp;My organization pays a yearly fee for unlimited access.&nbsp;&nbsp;Full articles are provided on a cost recovery basis (copyright, duplication).&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;

 

[JimKSC]

I agree with Troy.&nbsp;&nbsp;There is too much information to chew through.&nbsp;&nbsp;We need some way to filter out the &quot;stuff&quot;.&nbsp;&nbsp;Make it easier for the customer, please.<br><br>Jim Hoffman (EE)

 

[a3a]

I came across a web site that had a server dedicated to .PDF files (read by Adobe software). Just type in a topic or subject in a search box and the result was a list of only PDF files, nothing else. However, I didn't check the extent of engineering articles that would be of interest to those practicing engineering because I was using if for a sociology class at the time. To top it off, I lost that site and have been searching ever since. Anyway, the thing that I liked about this server/service was:

1. It was Free
2. The .pdf format allows pictures/diagrams to be cleanly placed within the article and all subtopics were highlighted for easy reading
3. The results were all in one format
4. The articles were numerous, but the results were displayed with the closest-match first.
5. I believe anyone who has an article can summit one
6. No advertisements

Though this particular site may not be much interest to engineers, it may be possible that the idea can be applied to our profession.

I've seen other &quot;information services&quot; on the web similar to what Louis uses, and they all charge for an article or paper-back report. I'm not against paying for something that I'm interested in, but most of the articles that were returned for my search were those published by universities. So, someone is cashing in on this when a 5 page report costs around $20; I doubt much, if any, goes to the universty.

http://www.ntis.gov/search.htm

is almost a good example, but kind of along the lines of Amazon.com.

What I would like to see is a service that is fueled and maintained by the profession, much like this entire forum is. *Online* is the key word for me. I would guess that universities would take part for free to spread their names, and some advertisement may give a reason for the big engineering firms to participate as well. I like the word FREE, though, because I too would like to read other articles that are just plain interesting. Even if it is not free, i would love to see it.

I would like to work on something like this, but having just graduated I need to concentrate on getting out of my small town and into the engineering workforce for now.

 

[MagnumOpus]

The best place to look for any information is on forums, such as this, and usenet.

I formerly wasted a lot of time trying to find information on the

http://WWW and

I finally spent a little bit of time to find about 10 good user forums and I now make it my first move to search those and groups.google.com for information.

I usually find an answer with those 11 resources(90+ % of the time) and it takes about 10% of the amount of time that it would to weed through a list of sites from a search engine.

Magnum Opus

 

[PM]

If you solve this problem, you might become a wealthy person. When I was doing more reseach than engineering, I found nothing on-line because there was no on-line. We still had to sift through mountains of irrelevant information to find what we wanted. To this extent nothing has changed.

Keeping up to-date in your own discipline is also challenging. There's no choice but to subscribe to half a dozen journals and prepare for a lot of reading.

I doubt there will be reliable meta-search algorithims available in our career time frames that will pin point exactly what we are looking for 9 times out of 10. Perhaps this is a good thing because all the really interesting stuff that I profited from the most, came to me by accident. In this sense, this may be time consuming, but not necessarily a waste of $.

Regards,