Engineers Encountering Engineers: Identifying Conference Papers

This post was written by John F. Buydos, Science Reference Section, Science, Technology and Business Division, Library of Congress

Whether it is engineers collaborating with other engineers to remain up-to-date in their field or to discuss the competency of other practitioners, one of the major ways that collaboration is accomplished is by attending conferences and other meetings. Identifying the published proceedings of these conferences and meetings can enlighten the general public and help them discover new trends, history, and research of specific technologies.

Conferences often are held yearly in the same country but not necessarily in the same city. There are instances where a number of conferences move from country to country. Some conferences proceedings can be found on the web site of the conference or its sponsoring body.

Some Interesting Recent and Upcoming Conferences

American Photoengravers Association convention. Vandercook & Sons exhibit. Washington Region, ca. 1920-ca. 1950. (Theodor Horydczak) https://www.loc.gov/item/thc1995007360/PP/.

In addition to searching the online catalog of the Library of Congress for conference proceedings, you may wish to look for and visit web sites of particular conferences or their sponsoring bodies. Examples of recent and upcoming conferences include:

Autonomous Vehicles 2017 Summit, August 22-24, 2017, Detroit, Michigan

Mobile World Congress, February 26 to March 1, 2018, Barcelona, Spain
Mobile World Congress Shanghai 2017: The Human Element

RISE Conference, July 8-11, 2018, Hong Kong

4th Industrial Revolution/Industrial Strategy Meeting/World Economic Forum (Center for the Fourth Industrial Revolution)

STS Forum (The Science and Technology in Society Forum)

RoboUniverse
Seoul, June 27-29, 2018
Tokyo, October 3-6, 2017
Seoul, June 28-30, 2017

Oxford Symposium on Food & Cookery
Food and Landscape: 2017
Seeds: 2018

Also check these sites for just some of the sponsoring organizations:

A few sites that aggregate information for upcoming conferences:

Look for sites for conferences in specific subject areas, such as:

Published proceedings available at the Library of Congress

Eventually many of these conferences and meetings result in published proceedings. The Library of Congress receives conference proceedings through copyright deposit, transfer from other government agencies, gift, exchange, and purchase and these may be identified by using the Online Catalog or the Electronic Resources page.

The Science, Technology and Business Division has in its technical reports collection many conference proceedings on CD-ROM. It has nearly one hundred USB drives, and most of these drives contain conference proceedings with IEEE dominating the collection. About 50% of these have come to the Library of Congress in 2017, so the numbers are likely to grow more quickly in the future. These and the CDs are listed on our website at: Technical Reports on Digital Media. The photo to the right includes examples of different shapes in the collection.

Some databases are useful for identifying the conferences, while some also provide full text of the conference proceedings. So if you are looking for Databases that include conference proceedings, these are available onsite at the Library of Congress:

PapersFirst: This is an index of papers presented at conferences worldwide and covers every published congress, symposium, conference, exposition, workshop and meeting received by the British Library Document Supply Centre. Subject areas include: arts, economics, humanities, politics, sciences, and social sciences. Coverage: 1993 to present

Addresses Delivered at the First Joint Meeting, Scientific alliance of New York. https://lccn.loc.gov/17030503

ProceedingsFirst: This is an index covering congresses, symposiums, conferences, expositions, workshops and meetings worldwide received by The British Library Document Supply Centre. Each record lists the papers presented at each conference. Coverage: 1993 to present

Conference Proceedings Citation Index Science: This database fully indexes more than 148,000 proceedings from the most significant conferences, symposia, seminars, colloquia, workshops, and conventions in the sciences and social sciences worldwide. Over 12,000 conference titles added annually. Coverage: 1990 to present

IEEE Conference Proceedings Archive: This database includes more than 3,600 historical IEEE proceedings with coverage dating from 1951 through 1999, across numerous areas of technology. The collection includes all of the IEEE conference material currently available in IEEE Xplore for the years specified. IEEE conference papers are authored by visionaries of pioneering technologies. The archive includes papers from thousands of authors, including classic papers from legendary pioneers in engineering, and covers a wide range of disciplines in electrical engineering and computing and supports many programs at institutions, including engineering, computer science, medicine, information science, and business.

Events like conferences, seminars and webinars are intended to offer the sharing of knowledge in a global platform where various researchers from every part of the world join together in a common purpose.

Engineers Encountering Engineers: Identifying Conference Papers

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