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<h3 class="con">The Significance of
Societies and Associations on Engineering Literature</h3> 

<p> Associations and Societies play a prominent role in the field of
Engineering and in the bulk of the literature that is produced in the
field.  It is important to gain a basic understanding of how these
organizations fit into how engineering collections have traditionally been
organized and why problems of access in this field are unique in many
ways.</p>br/>
<p> The field of engineering consists of those working in both
the government or not-for-profit sectors as well as the for-profit sector.  
Much of the literature, besides those sponsored by the government, are
produced by societies and associations that serve the needs of those most
active in the profit sectors.  Some of these organizations have a
prominent role and identity in the publishing of engineering literature,
have a stronghold on the types of information that gets produced, cited,
or referred to.  As a result, how such information resources are
collected, catalogued, and organized is largely dependent on how each
individual organization that publishes such research decides to organize
or catalog the information.</p><br/>
<p>In short, there is no significant 
uniformity
in how information is organized in engineering. One society may choose to
produce conference proceedings and designate them in a certain manner and
a few year's down the road, the same organization may decide after
partnering with another organization on a specific conference, to transfer
the duties of publishing the conference proceedings to the partner
organization.  Now that organization B is producing the proceedings,
organization B gets to decide what to call the proceedings and how to
identify the proceedings, which could be completely inconsistent from how
organization A had been doing it.  Since there is no standard or agreement
as to how information is organized, organization B will not feel it is
incumbent on them to publish the proceedings in any way that would make it
recognizably connected or related to the conference proceedings produced
by organization A.<br/><p>It will help to remember that societies and
associations have a significant impact on much of the literature or 
resources in the field of Engineering.</p><br/><br/>
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