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Overview
Engineering Case Studies Online focuses on engineering failures and employs the case study method for learning from the past. Materials included in cases can range from documentaries, accident reports, company reports, photographs and interviews. There are 58 cases that include significant supporting materials. Other cases are currently included with minimal information. The case studies product was released in February 2014, and is expected to be completed in late 2014.
Alexander Street Press is a new name to many engineering librarians and engineering faculty. The focus of their previous products are in humanities, social science, and health care fields. This new product, released in early February, 2014, focuses on analysis and study of engineering failures. While called case studies, they are not presented as formal cases, leaving how the materials are used and crafted into a case to be explored up to the individual faculty member teaching.
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Collection Content
Engineering Case Studies Online focuses on engineering failures and employs the case study method for learning from the past. Materials included in cases can range from documentaries, accident reports, company reports, photographs and interviews. There are 58 cases that include significant supporting materials. Other cases are currently included with minimal information. The case studies product was released in February 2014, and is expected to be completed in late 2014.
Alexander Street Press is a new name to many engineering librarians and engineering faculty. The focus of their previous products are in humanities, social science, and health care fields. This new product, released in early February, 2014, focuses on analysis and study of engineering failures. While called case studies, they are not presented as formal cases, leaving how the materials are used and crafted into a case to be explored up to the individual faculty member teaching.
Many of the case studies included will be recognizable to anyone who has studied or taught engineering and used noteable failures as a teaching tool. No longer does the librarian or faculty member have to struggle to find footage of “Galloping Gertie” (the Tacoma Narrows Bridge), or pictures of the aftermath of the Hyatt Regency balcony collapse. More current cases are also included, such as the Fukushima Nuclear Power plant disaster and the Deepwater Horizon oil well explosion.
While many of the cases are classic studies in engineering, suggestions for additional cases to be included have been gathered from members of the advisory committee, which consists of both engineering subject librarians and engineering faculty.
The cases included are global in scope, as are the resources gathered to present the event. While the content will expand during 2014, after that the product is envisioned as a complete collection. Some cases will continue to have minimal content, as their inclusion is due to information present in source material for other cases that are considered primary. The publisher reports the following anticipated breakdown of types of content: 33% video documentaries; 25% "front/back matter"; 20% accident reports; 10% general reference; 12% assorted graphic material including photographs, technical drawings, maps, and graphs.
Some of the material included in Engineering Case Studies Online may overlap with library holdings, in particular a few books that include written accounts of several engineering failure cases. There is a notable advantage to having the content included in this online tool, including the ability for multiple people to access the material at one time, and that through the event page for a particular case it is paired with available video, interview transcripts, reports, timelines, and news coverage.
Much of the video content is licensed from BBC, A&E, World Wide Entertainment, Future Media (Australia) and ABC. There is some raw news camera footage availble, and many produced documentaries that are tagged for the sections faculty are likely to be interested in showing.
Delivery
Presenting video content alongside web resources and traditional printed materials is not new for Alexander Street Press, so much of the interface works well based on years of developing similar products for other disciplines.
Individual case studies are presented on what is called an event page. The main event page shows a still image to identify the case, a short description that can be expanded, the item or object involved, and the type of engineering involved. Asking for additional information in this box shows a beginning time, number of injuries, and factors in the event, e.g. material failure. To the right of this summary is generally a timeline of events, where a user can scroll through to identify particular resources or video clips and follow links directly to that content. Related materials are listed below the timeline, sorted by title as a default. It is possible to choose a sort order of either newest or oldest first by date.
Indexing
When looking at an event page, the starting place for all materials related to a particular case, there are a variety of options to refine the search that are quite helpful, including format of the material, type of coverage, and organizations, people, and places discussed. When the “more” option below a facet is selected, the user has the option of either including or excluding a particular facet.
The indexing, as seen in the fielded/subject selection option, is currently a bit quirky, at least in the eyes of a librarian. There is enough overlap in engineering disciplines that some results in a given results set that do not seem to fit can be expected. Despite that, choosing to limit by a particular field of engineering and then seeing different engineering subjects presented as additional refining categories can be confusing.
Technical platform & interface
The interface allows users to easily create their own clips from videos, if the section you want to show while teaching hasn’t already been identified.
The interface and materials are presented in English. Translations are available for the interface. For five commonly selected languages, the translation has been read and edited by people who speak the language. For other languages, Google Translate is used to provide a non-English interface.
Terms
Engineering Case Studies Online is available as either an annual subscription, or as a one-time purchase with a small annual access fee.
Book-level and product-level records are available from Alexander Street Press.
Strengths and Weaknesses
There are many strengths to a resources such as this one, particularly presenting all the pieces of particular cases that would take teaching faculty a long time to gather on their own. The presence of the timeline that can help a user understand when during an event particular activites were happening. In addition, the pre-existing clips from videos and the ability for the user generate unique clips enhance the usefulness. Having the video commentary transcribed in an added strength that can be used to navigate to portions of the video.
On the weaknesses side, there are a few. The potentially confusing issues with subject selection and definition have been mentioned already. Also, it may be unclear to users what differentiates traffic accidents from traffic engineering as different subject headings. In addition, the current presentation of identification for web resources is less than complete. Alexander Street Press is very aware of this situation and working to fix the problems. Once corrected, the display of web resources will include minimally a URL along with the page title. Finally, linking to a clip can be confusing, as the entire video loads, but when played it jumps to the tagged or clipped section and only plays the desired chunk. This is not really a weakness as much as a potentially confusing presentation.
Reviewers
Amy S. Van Epps, Engineering Librarian, Purdue University Libraries
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