During the Disasters and Hazards Exercise the books in the list linked above are set aside for you on a trolley in the Short Loan Collection on the ground floor of the McClay Library.
The books are only available for consultation within the Short Loan section. They cannot be taken out of that area or borrowed. When you have finished with a book, please put it back on the trolley, so that it is available for your colleagues.
Some of the books have additional copies which are located on the upper floors of the McClay Library. These additional copies may be borrowed from the library.
Use the library's Article Search (located on the Library homepage) to find online articles from academic journals.
Search for keywords which describe the topic you are interested in. E.g. search for hurricane katrina failure analysis
If your initial search results do not look relevant, consider different words or expressions which might be used to describe the search topic. When you begin searching, it can be useful to try several search words, to see which bring you back the most relevant results.
Article Search will often bring back thousands of results. You can use the filter options on the left-hand side of the Article Search results screen to narrow down your search results. For instance, you can tick the boxes “Limit To:” “Peer Review” and “Source Types:” “Academic Journals” to remove general, non-academic articles (e.g. newspaper articles) from your results list.
Have a look at your search results and check how relevant they look to your topic. The title of an article will give you an idea of the content it covers. To see more details about an article, click on its title. Often this will provide you with further information about the article, such as a summary of its content.
If you find a relevant article and you would like to read it, check for a link to the article text. This link could be called Check for full text availability, HTML Full Text or PDF Full Text. If you are trying to access an article when you are not signed in to the QUB campus network, you may be asked to sign in for access with your QUB ID card details.
Article Search covers articles from many academic disciplines, including law, medicine, history etc. If the articles you find don't look relevant to engineering, consider searching in one of the journal packages listed in the box below. They contain fewer articles than Article Search, but the articles are more focused on civil engineering than on other academic discipline.
If you want to search beyond Article Search, the following e-journal packages are good places to find more papers from academic journals:
Hardcopies of engineering journals published from 1981 to the present are shelved in the Journal Back Issues area on floor 3 of the McClay Library.
Journal volumes which were published before 1981 are kept in the Library Store. Please ask at the Borrower Services Desk on the ground floor if you wish to consult them.
Some hazards and disasters may not appear in books or journal articles because they occurred recently or are relatively obscure. You may be able to find information about them in newspaper articles using the Nexis UK newspaper database. However, please be aware that newspaper articles are not considered academic sources.
If Nexis UK doesn't provide information on your topic of interest you can check one of the other online newspaper databases which are available at Queen's University:
If you experience any difficulties with your research, please contact the subject librarian for civil engineering:
Irene Bittles
Email: i.bittles@qub.ac.uk
The following e-books are recommended for this exercise. Please note that you may be asked to sign in with your QUB ID card details.
Natural hazards (2nd ed.) by 
At risk: natural hazards, people's vulnerability and disasters (2nd ed.) by 
Windscale 1957 : anatomy of a nuclear accident (2nd ed.) by 
World Trade Center building performance study: data collection, preliminary observations and recommendations by 
Engineering catastrophes: causes and effects of major accidents (3rd ed.) by 
Learning from construction failures : applied forensic engineering by 
Learning from accidents (3rd ed.) by 
Learning from disasters: a management approach (3rd ed.) by 
Design paradigms: case histories of error and judgment in engineering by 