University of Virginia Library

Section A. Engineering.

There are five fairly extensive collections in Virginia of
material on engineering: at the University of Virginia, 8,437
volumes; at the Virginia Polytechnic Institute, 6,983 volumes;
at the State Library, 6,020 volumes; at the Coast Artillery
School, 5,701 volumes; and at the specialized Norfolk and Western
Transportation Library, 2,500 books and 3,000 pamphlets, a
total of 5,500. Smaller collections are to be found in Lexington,
at the Virginia Military Institute and at Washington and Lee
University. But as the Engineering School at Washington and Lee
has recently been discontinued, further additions will probably
not be made to that collection.

The Norfolk and Western Railway Transportation Library[21] at
Roanoke contains material on the economic, geological, and
historical phases of transportation as well as on engineering;
and attention has been given to air, highway, and water transportation
as well as to railways. A considerable part of the
collection, however, deals with railway engineering. The material
is chiefly in the form of books, pamphlets, and railway
reports. There are also a few engineering journals; and there
are sets of the proceedings of the American Railway Association
and of its Freight Claims Division, of the American Railway
Engineering and Maintenance of Way Association, of the American
Railway Master Mechanics' Association, of the Master Car Builders'
Association, and of the Railway Stockkeepers' Association.

In the collection at the Coast Artillery School at Fort
Monroe the emphasis is on electrical, mechanical, and military
engineering. There are runs of eighteen journals, the more complete
files being those of the Journal of the Franklin Institute,
the Military Engineer, the Scientific American, the Transactions
of the American Society of Civil Engineers, and the Transactions
of the Society of Mechanical Engineers.

At the State Library, city and state reports and United
States serial publications form about two-thirds of the collection.
The points of stress are hydraulic, mining, railway, and
highway engineering. There are sets of twenty journals; several
of these, such as the American Railroad Journal, the Artizan,
the Journal of the Franklin Institute, and the Journal of the
Society of Arts, London, go back to the first half of the

nineteenth century. There is some material on the history of
engineering.

The collection at the Virginia Polytechnic Institute covers
practically all types of engineering, as may be seen by an
enumeration of the volumes in each branch: aeronautical engineering,
281 volumes; agricultural engineering, 109; architectural
engineering (including volumes on architecture), 741; ceramic
engineering, 81; chemical engineering (not including theoretical
chemistry), 512; civil engineering, 1,191; electrical engineering,
978; general engineering, 714; graphics, 124; industrial
engineering, 438; mechanical engineering, 1,091; mining engineering,
723; the grand total being 6,983 volumes. Of engineering
periodicals and society proceedings there are 134 different
titles. The collection includes about thirty volumes of engineering
history and about twenty volumes of engineering biography.
There is a complete set of the Transactions of the Newcomen
Society which deal mainly with the history of engineering and of
technology.

At the University of Virginia also the collection covers
all branches; but there is emphasis on civil, electrical, mechanical,
and chemical engineering. There are files of 307 engineering
serials, of which ninety-five are currently received. The
sets of the following are complete: Proceedings of the American
Society of Civil Engineers, the Refrigerating Data Book of the
American Society of Refrigerating Engineers, the Automatic
Electric Review, the Bell System Technical Journal, the Bell Telephone
Quarterly, Civil Engineering, Communication and Broadcast
Engineering, Electrical Maintenance, the Transactions of the
Illuminating Engineering Society, Industrial and Engineering
Chemistry, the Transactions of the Institution of Chemical
Engineers, the Proceedings of the Institution of Mechanical
Engineers, the Engineering Research Bulletin of the Department
of Engineering Research of the University of Michigan, the Contributed
Technical Papers on Stratospheres of the National Geographic
Society, the Bulletin Series of the Engineering Experiment
Station of the Oregon Agricultural College, Television,
published by the R.C.A. Institute, Inc., the Series of Monograms
on Electrical Engineering published in Great Britain, the Strowger
Technical Journal, and the Publications of the School of Engineering
of Yale University.