The role of computer networks in aerospace engineering - Libraries and the Internet: Education, Practice & Policy

The mail questionnaire also asked respondents to describe the availability, use, and perceived value of various types of computer network applications (see Table 3). File transfer was the computer network application reportedly available to the greatest percentage of respondents (85 percent), followed by electronic mail (82 percent), accessing remote data files (82 percent), remote log-in to run a computer program (80 percent), and electronic bulletin boards or conferencing systems (77 percent). These applications were also the network features most likely to be used. Less available were applications that supported access to published literature, such as electronic journals or newsletters (61 percent) or online library catalog searching (62 percent). It should be noted that these responses indicate a lack of perceived availability; some aerospace engineers may simply not be aware that certain applications are available to them. As a point of general comparison, 94 percent of respondents indicated that fax was available in their workplace, and 77 percent reported the availability of telephone voice mail. The percentage of respondents considering the value of each computer network application application to be "great" or "some" varied from a high of 83 percent for electronic mail to a low of 41 percent for computer-integrated manufacturing.

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Throughout the survey, value judgments were made by all respondents, whether or not they currently had access to or used the network feature in question. Overall value judgments, in this particular instance, may be colored by whether or not a specific application is used by a large number of respondents, even though respondents were also given the answer option of "Application is NOT APPLICABLE to My Work." For example, CIM may be assessed by a smaller percentage of respondents as valuable to their work because it is directly applicable to the work of a relatively smaller number of the aerospace engineers who completed this survey.

Tables 4-5 report the availability, use, and value of network access to various work resources in aerospace engineering. In describing network access to human resources (Table 4), more respondents (about 85 percent) were able to communicate electronically with people within their own organization more so than with people in other organizations, which coincides with the greater availability of local and organizational networks reported earlier. Private sector colleagues or associates were least likely to be accessible over the network, with between 61 percent and 66 percent of respondents reporting such access. Network access to people in other departments of one's own organization was judged valuable by the greatest number of respondents (81 percent), while access to external colleagues, customers, vendors, and so on was apparently considered slightly less important. This may reflect the feeling--accepted as common knowledge by observers of the engineering enterprise--that internal communication of any kind is generally more critical in engineering work than is external communication. On the other hand, the number of aerospace engineers who do use networks to communicate with various kinds of people outside their own organizations (between 52 percent and 72 percent) may surprise those who thought that such links, at least in the private sector, were still largely prohibited due to proprietary and security concerns.