Members of the class may find themselves encountering less familiar types of material. Sometimes a lucky Internet search will reveal the needed text but industry standards, for example, are usually not freely available. Also, even freely available technical materials government sometimes seem to be hidden away or can be difficult to interpret.
Industry Standards:
UT-Austin's subscriptions include ASTM, IEEE, ASME, and ACI. Those offered through the Accuris interface require registration before use and some require special software.
Agencies of the U.S. federal government have increasingly gone to using industry standards as their standards.
There's more about standards in this guide:
U.S Federal Regulations:
are published in the Federal Register and codified in the Code of Federal Regulations. Both are available through these databases:
Unlimited users.
Updated daily. Govinfo provides free public access to official publications from all three branches of the Federal Government.
Unlimited users.
Updated regularly. Provides a collection of legal periodicals, reproducing the original image of each article. Includes over 1,200 law review journals containing more than 600,000 articles from 21,000 volumes.
Access to this resource is funded by the Tarlton Law Library at the Jamail Center for Legal Research.
Regulatory material may also be published and available at the website of the issuing agency.
Patents:
The Engineering Library is a designated U.S. Patent and Trademark Resource Center. We can help with finding patent information and --- for searching existing patents --- especially recommend:
Also, we have a guide on searching for patent information:
Reports / Rulings / Enforcements:
You may find helpful reports from research agencies --- these might be governmental or non-governmental, such as from a university. These are often posted freely on the Internet and may be found with Google (or similar) searching. If this fails, try next going to the website of the agency responsible for the report. Information at the site also may help determine whether a report has been issued.
Here are some sites for agencies likely to be involved in accident investigations:
For reports from non-governmental research groups:
Unlimited users.
Global Think Tanks provides access to more than 30 million pages of books, articles, working papers, reports, policy briefs, data sets, tables, charts, media, case studies, and statistical publications from thousands of policy organizations. Includes more than 100,000 publications from 650+ defunct and inactive think tanks.
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