This guide helps you find information for the Disasters and Hazards Exercise.
All online resources listed below can be used off-campus as well as on-campus. You may be asked to sign in with your QUB credentials.
If you experience any difficulties with your research, please contact the subject librarian for civil engineering, Irene Bittles (email: i.bittles@qub.ac.uk)
You may find some of the following e-books useful for this exercise.
Please note that you may be asked to sign in with your QUB credentials.
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 
Bridge Failures and Lessons Learnt by 
The Türkiye earthquake sequence of February 2023 : a longitudinal study report by EEFIT by The Hyogo-Ken Nanbu (Kobe) earthquake of 17 January 1995 : a field report by The Erzincan, Turkey earthquake of 13 March 1992: a field report by The Northridge, California earthquake of 17 January 1994: a field report 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 The McClay Library also holds printed books which may be useful for this exercise. A selection of printed books has been listed for you below, and more can be found on this Word document:
Natural Disasters by Global Disasters by Catastrophic failures by 
Engineering Safety by The nature of structural design and safety by 
The Kobe Earthquake by 
Inviting Disaster by 8.6 : The Great Alaska Earthquake, March 27, 1964 by 
Mount St. Helens by 
Piper Alpha : lessons for life-cycle safety management by The Lynmouth flood disaster by 
Atico, Peru, Mw 8.4 Earthquake of June 23, 2001 by The Mexican earthquake of 19 September 1985 : a field report by EEFIT by 
Natural and Man-Made Hazards by 
Derail : why trains crash by 
Construction Failure by Engineering and the Mind's Eye by 
Failed Technology by 
After the Event by Use Library Search to find more books as well as 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 different search words or combinations of different search words, to see which bring you back the most relevant results.
Library Search will often find thousands of results. You can use the refinement options on the left-hand side of the results screen to narrow down your search results. For instance, you can select Resource Type “Articles” and Availability “Peer-reviewed 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 a book or article will give you an idea of the content it covers. To see more details about it, click on its title. Often this will provide you with further information such as a summary of its content.
If you find a relevant book or article and you would like to read it, check for a link in the "View Online" section of the screen. Click the link to be connected to the source online. You may be asked to sign in with your QUB credentials. For printed books you will see location information in the library.
Library Search covers books and articles from many academic disciplines. If the sources you find don't look relevant to your project, consider searching in one of the following engineering journal packages. They contain fewer articles than Library Search, but the articles may be more relevant to civil engineering:
Full-text journals and conference papers from the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE).
Full-text access to journals published by the Institution of Civil Engineers (ICE).
Full-text access to the complete run of The Structural Engineer journal from 1923 to the present.
Newspapers:
Some events may not be covered in books or in academic 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.
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 Customer Service Desk on the ground floor if you wish to consult them.
