CIVT 3401K: Highway and Transportion Engineering

Welcome to the CIVT 3401K: Highway and Transportation Engineering research guide.

You are going to be working on a project, in which you will tackle a real-world problem involving highway/transport engineering. My job - as your librarian - is to help you work through the real world problem you are solving by enabling you to IDENTIFY AND LOCATE the best resources for your problem. 

In order to do this, I frequently have to help students articulate the problem they are addressing, that is, express it as a whole and then in terms of its major conceptual components. For example, if you are considering ways to make intersections safer for pedestrians at night, I might identify the main concepts as

intersection

vehicular traffic

pedestrian/foot traffic

safety

night or visibility

Note that I might identify different ways of expressing these ideas. The key is to take your main question and distill the major conceptual terms from it. These are the terms I would then use - as a beginning - to start finding resources across the various platforms (databases, catalogs, the Web) available to you.

Of course, it also helps to do some broad-level thinking about the universe of where the sources you might use come from. Consider these source types and the institutions that produce them:

• scholarly articles
• newspaper articles
• magazine articles (popular and industry-specific)
• Webpages from individuals
• Webpages from government agencies
• Reports
• Books by one or more authors (academic, professional, and popular)

Keeping both of these areas of your search in mind will help you keep things together as you conduct research. This guide provides an overview of tools and some tips for using them more effectively. Remember that practice makes perfect.