The Role of Digital Libraries in Teaching Materials Science and Engineering

Abstract

Nowadays, the number of commercially available materials is growing steadily. Technical information on materials resides in digital libraries that complement classical Materials Science and Engineering (MSE) textbooks. Information on materials in the form of databases of material properties can elaborate on the science and engineering fundamentals explained in textbooks with real data about current materials. Hence digital libraries can become a learning tool to support teaching of science and engineering fundamentals. This chapter described two courses offered for the Mechanical Engineering degree at Instituto Superior Tecnico, Portugal, namely Materials Science and Materials in Engineering. The Materials Science course uses the traditional textbooks and a bottom-up approach. In the Materials in Engineering course, the CES EduPack database was introduced to support a design-led approach. This chapter showed that the teaching of Materials Science with databases should be encouraged and described a successful experience with teaching Materials in Engineering using digital libraries.