Survey of Library Services at Engineering News Record's Top 500 Design Firms: Implications for Engineering Education

Journal of Engineering Education, Jul 2004 by Napp, John B

The 20.1 percent overlap of firms without degreed librarians and those where principals felt new engineers cannot find needed information without assistance was an unexpected finding. One possible explanation is that senior engineers provide assistance to the new engineers in those firms. Without further study it is impossible to know the actual reason or reasons for what appears to be an inconsistency.

V. CONCLUSIONS

1. Most consulting engineering firms do not have librarians. Only 25.6 percent of the 109 firms in this study had a librarian. While larger firms tend to be more likely to have librarians, this is not always the case.

2. The firms that do have a librarian do not always employ a degreed librarian. In this study, 20.1 percent of firms responding employed a librarian with a Masters of Library Science or its equivalent.

3. The person serving in the role of librarian may have primary job assignments outside of the library making them less available for research assistance than engineers might find desirable. This person might be the receptionist or a technician and have little or no training in librarianship. Some of the librarians who lack a formal degree may have many years of experience and may be skilled at locating information, but that would be highly variable. The author did not ask about the full-time or part-time status of the librarians in the survey, but a few did indicate that they worked part-time. This would certainly limit their availability and would require more self-sufficiency among engineers.

4. Many principals in such firms believe that new engineers can find needed information on their own. This means that the new engineer will be expected to be able to locate and use needed information on their own.

5. The databases engineering students may be used to accessing are generally not available at engineering firms. Of firms responding, 86.2 percent have no database access. Engineering students need to learn how to search for information using the limited resources that most firms will have available. They can also learn to make use of the resources local academic and public libraries provide.

The information resources available to most engineers working in consulting design firms are quite limited. There is also an expectation at many of these firms that new engineers will be able to find needed information on their own. One way for students to acquire the high level of competency necessary to do this is for information literacy instruction to be integrated into the engineering curriculum.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The author wishes to thank Dr. Nagi Naganathan, Dean of the College of Engineering and Dr. John Gaboury, Dean of University Libraries, both at the University of Toledo, for their support of this research.

REFERENCES

[1] Leckie, Gloria J., and Anne Fullerton, "Information Literacy in Science and Engineering Undergraduate Education: Faculty Attitudes and Pedagogical Practices," College & Research Libraries, Vol. 60, No. 1, January 1999, pp. 9-29.