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Environmental engineering is primarily concerned with the application of technology to the urgent tasks of cleaning up our environment. Its practitioners generally attempt to cope with the problems of streams and waterways polluted by sewage and industrial waste, oceans damaged by oil spills and sewage sludge dumpings, air polluted with noxious fumes and land abused by solid waste disposal. But that is not all that they do. The recent energy crisis has sharply brought into focus the need for alternate energy strategies, including energy extraction from solid waste. Under current estimates, the United States will produce approximately 340 million tons of solid waste by 1980. This is equivalent to one ton of solid waste per person per year. The most widely used methods of waste disposal right now are dumping, incineration and sanitary landfill. They are expensive and they cause pollution. Instead, solid waste can be burned to produce steam which can be used for heating or to generate electricity. It can also be converted to pyrolysis gas or oil, which can be stored or transported. It is from this standpoint that environmental engineering assumes considerable importance. A report which presents an overview of the state of the art in this area is the Resource Recovery from Municipal Solid Waste. Other pertinent guides include Energy from Solid Waste, Conversion of Refuse to Energy, Recycling and Reclaiming of Municipal Solid Wastes, Resource Recovery and Recycling Handbook of Industrial Wastes, and Wasteheat Management Guidebook. No project of this nature can be undertaken without government assistance. A description of the activities of the Federal Solid Waste Management Program is available from EPA's Solid Waste Recycling Projects: A National Directory.

One of the leading indicators of the quality of human life is health and access to medical care. Increasing social concern over the problems of health has resulted in various nationwide proposals like medicare and medicaid. At present, many bills are pending before the United States Congress for the creation of a comprehensive national health insurance scheme. One result of this public awareness is the demand in many libraries for information on the various aspects of the health care industry in general and in particular, on health legislation, resources and facilities, prices and costs and insurance. The following survey aims to examine certain leading publications which provide statistical and other types of information in this area. Excluded from this survey are sources dealing specifically with clinical aspects of drugs and medicine. Moreover, additional and uptodate information on the specific topics discussed below can be obtained by consulting subject indexes like the Hospital Literature Index and the Insurance Periodicals Index.

A major event which is likely to have a considerable impact on engineering libraries and librarians is the inauguration (January 1, 1980) of the American Association of Engineering Societies (AAES), which, as a central organization representing the engineering profession, will now consolidate and augment the work hitherto handled by the Engineers Joint Council, Engineering Council for Professional Development and Association for Cooperation in Engineering. This is primarily looked upon as a device to enable engineering societies to communicate with each other more effectively. A unique feature of the AAES will be one of its autonomous groups, the Accreditation Commission for Engineering and Technology (ACET). The collection and dissemination of data on matters like engineering manpower and continuing education, until now handled by bodies like the EJC, will be entrusted to ACET.

For many engineering librarians, a most welcome event during the year under review was the publication of Professor Ching‐Chih Chen's Scientific and Technical Information Sources (the MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1977). Making use of her extensive knowledge and experience in the field, Ms. Chen has come out with an up‐to‐date and reliable reference source for scientists and engineers. Conventional as well as nonconventional sources of information are listed in this guide which cites nearly 3,700 titles, grouped in 23 categories. A matter of special interest to librarians is that the book generously provides review sources from library and scientific literature for most entries. Any librarian without a sci‐tech background should be able to make use of the volume for obtaining a working knowledge of his or her field. This is all the more important in an area like engineering, which is continually being extended by the addition of new interdisciplinary fields. This development is symbolized by the phenomenal growth in technical vocabulary not ordinarily defined in conventional lexicographic aids. This trend as well as the increasing use of electronic data bases for literature retrieval has stimulated the need for new as well as revised dictionaries and thesauri without which one cannot formulate a workable search strategy. Mercifully for librarians the supply of these basic sources is keeping pace with the demand. Some of the new and revised dictionaries are reviewed in detail elsewhere in this survey, but we mention here a few more to prove the point. These include The Condensed Chemical Dictionary, 9th ed., rev. by Gessner G. Hawley, New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1978; Glossary of Terms in Thermal Soil Mechanics by Alfreds R. Jumikis, Piscataway, N.J.: The State University of New Jersey, College of Engineering, 1977; Hydrographic Dictionary, 3d ed., Monte Carlo, International Hydrographic Organisation, 1977; The Pipeline Glossary and Directory, Beaconsfield, Bucks. Eng., Scientific Surveys Ltd., 1978; Modern Dictionary of Electronics, 5th ed., Rudolf F. Graf, Indianapolis, 1977; and Transportation‐Logistics Dictionary by Wallace Little, Washington, D.C., Traffic Service Corp., 1977. It is this writer's belief that the trend towards specialized subject dictionaries and thesauri will continue to grow for some time to come.

This survey covers civil, electrical and electronics, energy, environment, general, materials, mechanical, and traffic and transportation engineering. Areas such as biomedical and chemical engineering will be dealt with in future issues. Readers may find that the classifications included in this survey are not mutually exclusive but do occasionally overlap with one another. For instance, the section on environmental engineering includes a review of a book on the environmental impact of nuclear power plants, which might as easily have been part of the section on energy technology. Before we go into a discussion of data bases and indexes, I would like to note in this introductory section some recent bibliographic aids published during the period surveyed. Most engineering libraries will find them very valuable in their reference and acquisition functions. Since normal review sources will cover these books, I am merely listing them below: Malinowski, Harold Robert, Richard A. Gray and Dorothy A. Gray. Science and Engineering Literature. 2d ed., Littleton, Colorado, Libraries Unlimited, 1976. 368p. LC 76–17794 ISBN 0–87287–098–7. $13.30; Mildren, K. W., ed. Use of Engineering Literature. Woburn, Mass., Butterworths, 1976. 621p. ISBN 0–408–70714–3. $37.95. Mount, Ellis. Guide to Basic Information Sources in Engineering. New York, Wiley, Halsted Press, 1976. 196p. LC 75–43261 ISBN 0–47070–15013–0. $11.95 and Guide to European Sources of Technical Information. 4th ed., edited by Ann Pernet. Guernsey, Eng., F. Hodgson, 1976. 415p. ISBN 0–85280–161–0. $52.00.

The institution of an annual series devoted to current and ongoing research in economics and business should be considered one of the notable developments during the period under review. Long standing need for such a reference not withstanding, there has been until this year no systematic attempt to organize a continuing series which concentrated on selected areas of ongoing research, especially adapted to the Jahrbucher format. By facilitating the publication of research papers which are longer than the conventional journal‐length article yet shorter than a monograph, publishing outlets available to scholars in the field have been infinitely expanded. Two years ago, the Royal Economic Society and the Social Science Research Council of Great Britain, developed an experimental series, published by Macmillan, entitled Surveys of Applied Economics. The JAI Press, Greenwich, Conn., has now come out with an annual series, which is expected to fill the gaps in at least seventeen areas of economic theory and business. These are briefly listed below, with pertinent bibliographical citations: Research in Economic Anthropology: An Annual Compilation of Research. Series editor, George Dalton. vol. 1. Sept. 1977‐ $22.00 ISBN 0‐89232‐040‐9; Research in Economic History: An Annual Compilation of Research. Series editor, Paul Uselding. vol. 1. Sept. 1976‐ $22.50 ISBN 0‐89232‐001‐X; Research in Health Economics: An Annual Compilation of Research. Series editor, Richard M. Scheffler. vol. 1. Sept. 1977‐ $22.50 ISBN 0‐89232‐042‐7; Research in Human Capital and Development: An Annual Compilation of Research. Series editor, Ismail Sirageldin. vol. 1. June/July 1977‐ $22.50 ISBN 0‐89232‐019‐2; Research in International Business and Finance: An Annual Compilation of Research. Series editor, Robert G. Hawkins. vol. 1. May/June 1977‐ $23.50 ISBN 0‐89232‐031‐1; Research in Labor Economics: An Annual Compilation of Research. Series editor, Ronald G. Ehrenberg. vol. 1. March 1977‐ $22.50 ISBN 0‐89232‐017‐6; Research in Law and Economics: An Annual Compilation of Research. Series editor, Richard O. Zerbe. vol. 1. Sept. 1977‐ $22.50 ISBN 0‐89232‐028‐1; Research in Marketing: An Annual Compilation in Research. Series editor, Jagdish N. Sheth. vol. 1. June 1977‐ $22.50 ISBN 0‐89232‐041‐9; Research in Philosophy and Technology: An Annual Compilation of Research. Series editor, Paul T. Durbin. vol. 1. March 1977‐ $22.50 ISBN 0‐89232‐022‐2; Research in Political Economy: An Annual Compilation of Research. Series editor, Paul Zarembka. vol. 1. Sept. 1977‐ $22.50 ISBN 0‐89232‐020‐6; Research in Population Economics: An Annual Compilation of Research. Series editor, Julian L. Simon. vol. 1. April 1977‐ $22.50 ISBN 0‐89232‐018‐4; Applications of Management Science. Series editor, Matthew J. Sobel. vol. 1. 1977‐ $22.50. ISBN 0‐89232‐023‐0; Research in Econometrics. Series editor, Dennis J. Aigner. vol. 1. 1977‐ $22.50 ISBN 0‐89232‐039‐7; Research in Experimental Economics. Series editor, Vernon L. Smith. vol. 1. 1977‐ $22.50 ISBN 0‐89232‐030‐3; Research in Finance. Series editor, Haim Levy. vol. 1. 1977‐ $22.50 ISBN 0‐89232‐043‐5; Research in Organizational Behavior. Series editor, Barry Staw. vol. 1. 1977‐ $22.50 ISBN 0‐89232‐045‐1; Research in Public Policy and Management. Series editor, Colin Blaydon. vol. 1. 1977‐ $22.50 ISBN 0‐89232‐044‐3.

One of the most significant events that took place during the period under review was the recent symposium on economics bibliography held in July 1975 under the auspices of the International Economics Association. It met at the famous Institut fur Weltwirtschaft, University of Kiel, West Germany. The theme of the symposium was the “Organization and Retrieval of Economic Knowledge.” The papers presented there covered recent trends in data and bibliographic organization, the emerging library characteristics of many specific economic subfields, the emerging solutions to the library cost problem and the boundaries of methodologies of economics. At its conclusion the Symposium issued a statement identifying some concerns about the future of economics libraries and data retrieval. Pending the forthcoming publication of the entire transcript, interested readers may find a summary of the symposium in the Journal of Economic Literature (December 1975: 1320–1321). While it is not entirely appropriate for this survey, I would be remiss if I did not mention another significant occasion: the bicentennial of the publication of the great Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations in honor of which the Clardendon Press has issued a special reprint.

Anyone who attempts to publish an article should be familiar with the Writer's Market. This standard reference work, which describes the editorial policies of numerous book and journal publishers, is readily available in most libraries and bookstores.