Catalyst

The Gould Library has rich collections of books, journals, government documents, and other resources. You may access them via Catalyst, the online catalog that is shared by Carleton and St. Olaf. You may search Catalyst by title, author, subject, or word.

Computer Science scholarship is published as papers as well as conference proceedings.  You will find both of these in the databases below.  

Other research databases to search

May have a specific focus or be better for interdisciplinary searches

Googling Well

A great strategy is to identify organizations that are active around your topic and then look for a section of their website that includes publications, reports, or technical information. You can also search Google including the string ("white paper" OR "position paper") in your search to gather reports by various institutions and associations.

In a field where so much work is proprietary, patent searching may be one of the few publicly available ways to find out about new ideas in computer science and engineering. As you search, pay attention to:

• Inventor names (what else have they done? what else have they published?)
• Terminology associated with your project (useful for future searching)
• The history of projects similar to yours (what patents are they built on? Are you reinventing a wheel?)
• Citations to patents and scholarship

When you open an interesting patent, take a minute to look at its classification(s), and click on the text definition of any classification that seems interesting. If you click on the linked classification code, it'll run a search as you'd expect, but if you click on the text definition of the code it'll open up the classification hierarchy so you can see what the broader terms are that might be useful to you or whether the wording of a particular classification seemed right but its hierarchy makes it clear that you've veered off into a foreign land.

Also be aware that if you search for a classification number, google will return all the more specific numbers in the classification hierarchy as well as the number you searched.