I. Preface

The web has greatly improved the accessibility of scientific information; however the role of the web in formal scientific publishing, and rightly so, is still being debated.  (Lawrence, 2001) From the point of view of a librarian and information scientist, who uses and recommends aspects of the web daily, effectively searching the web is much like navigating a minefield.  Granted, formal references to web documents and sources are becoming increasingly commonplace, but this is confounded by invalid links and sometimes wildly inaccurate, false information. (Lawrence, 2001)  Currently, only about 8% of all journals are available online and for a discipline like Engineering, which often uses seminal pieces or even research a mere decade old, reliance solely upon the web for information can be impossible.  (Weston, 2002)
Having said that, there are better places to start than Google or AltaVista (although, they can return some excellent results if searched carefully) to begin your search for engineering information available on the web.  Listed below are a few of the good full text resources that are available for you to begin your exploration of the web.  A few of these have dialog boxes located on the page so that you can launch your search directly from this page.  Additionally, I've included a few of the sites where you can search tables of contents for citation information.  Though we may not have a subscription to these journals, obtaining copies for research has never been easier than it is now. Interlibrary loan services are getting faster and requests can arrive in a matter of days rather than weeks like it did just a few short years ago.  It is the expectation that as more and more libraries develop stronger and stronger web presences these services will increase in speed and deliverable formats.
 
1. Access to Scientific Information, Wil Weston (Nature) 420, 19 2002, pg. 19
2. Persistence of Web References in Scientific Research, Steve Lawrence,et. al. (IEEE Computer) 34, 2 2001. pg.26