Fundamentals of Engineering Design for Civil Engineering Freshman

I was asked to give a class for freshman civil engineering majors taking the Fundamentals of Engineering Design class. Most of these students had already been taken the library lectures given to Humanities 101 students. I talked about the structure of the technical literature and how state of the art information originally presented at conferences or published in research journals eventually is discussed in college textbooks. Students should begin their research using books and then do a database search for more recent research developments. The instructor asked me to demonsrate how to find information on earthquake resistant buildings. I found that there were several books written on this topic which should be consulted first. I then did the search in Scopus and showed how displaying by relevance was helpful. When I speak to freshmen, I always say the information seeking skills are developed over time.