MSE: Senior Design Project Course Guide: Background Information

• AccessScience
• Kirk-Othmer Encyclopedia of Chemical Technology
• Ullman's Encyclopedia of Industrial Chemistry
• Ceramic Properties Database
• Infotherm
  Infotherm provides experimental thermodynamic and physical properties for 26,000 mixtures and 6,900 pure substances from a total of 9,400 compounds
• Landolt-Bornstein Online Index
• Materials Data Sources
• NIST Ceramics WebBook
• NIST Reference on Constants, Units, and Uncertainty
• NIST Chemistry WebBook

• OpenDOAR - The Directory of Open Access Repositories
  The OpenDOAR service is being developed to support the rapidly emerging movement towards Open Access to research information. OpenDOAR is building a comprehensive and authoritative list of international institutional and subject-based repositories, as well as archives set up by funding agencies - like the National Institutes for Health in the USA or the Wellcome Trust in the UK and Europe. Users of the service are able to analyse repositories by location, type, the material they hold and other measures.
• Materials Algorithm Project
  The Materials Algorithms Project serves as a centre for the "validation" and distribution of algorithms of use in the modelling of materials, in the context of materials science and metallurgy. Validation in this context means that effort has been expended to check that the program reproduces the example output from the example inputs, that there is a reasonable level of documentation, and that appropriate references are provided.
• Nanohub
  The Nanohub is a web-based initiative spearheaded by the NSF-funded Network for Computational Nanotechnology.

Comprehensive Sites

• MSDS Search - Searchable database of over 750,000 MSDS
• Where to find MSDS on the Internet - Information and links for many MSDS databases

Government Sites

• EPA Materials Safety 
• ATSDR Agency for toxic substance and disease registration 

Organization Sites

• MatWeb - Materials Property Database
• Vermont Safety Information Resources on the Internet - MSDS database

University Sites

• Oregon State University - Extension Toxicology Network, Pesticide Information
• Oxford University - Safety data and information from the Physical and Theoretical Chemistry Laboratory

Listed below are discreet e-book collections providing reference and background information on topics in Electrical and Systems Engineering.  Additional titles in both print and electronic formats may be found using Franklin, our online catalog.  For example, here is a lecture on Project Management for Engineering Design from the Synthesis Digital Library.

Books are a great source of background information on a topic.  One thing to be aware of with this type of literature, however, is that the information contained is not necessarily the most current, as the publication process for a book is lengthy.

The primary tool to search the Engineering books in our collection is our online catalog, Franklin, which is linked below.  Also provided are tools for searching beyond Penn's collections.  Print books are located primarily in Van Pelt and LIBRA, our remote storage facility.