2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Research in Progress: Engineering Research for Indigenous Engineering Techniques

Presented at Engineering Libraries Division (ELD) Technical Session 5: Collections & Spaces

As universities enroll more Native American engineering majors and hire more Native faculty, it has become imperative to be able to find research related to Indigenous techniques and methods in engineering. Since less than 1% of all articles in Compendex and Inspec have the words “indigenous,” “native,” or “aboriginal” in the title, abstract or keyword fields, this becomes a challenge. As part of our broader research project into how to discover Native American research in science databases, this paper focuses on engineering terms, broad terms for engineering and specifically on prominently known Arizona tribes, whose various colonial and Native names also present challenges for identifying relevant research. Examining both Compendex and Inspec on the Engineering Village platform, we explore the Boolean command protocol challenges as well as the unique search options offered on the Engineering Village platform has. The selected topics for this segment of the research highlights the challenges of the terms for Indigenous water use and Native farming techniques. This paper will highlight important skills and considerations for librarians who assist with research on Native American engineering topics and will also address current deficiencies in the controlled vocabularies in major engineering databases.

Authors

Ms. Jeanette M. Mueller-Alexander http://orcid.org/0000-0002-5845-0114 Arizona State University Library [biography]

Has been a Librarian for over 40 years specializing in cross-disciplinary database searching and retrieval of scholarly articles. A special interest has always been retrieval of research about or by Native Americans.
Alexander Soto Labriola National American Indian Data Center [biography]

Alexander Soto (Tohono O’odham) is director of the Labriola National American Indian Data Center at Arizona State University (ASU) Library. Under his leadership, the Labriola Center has developed and implemented culturally informed library services, expanded its personnel four-fold, and re-established its physical locations as culturally safe spaces for Indigenous library users. Alex co-authored ASU Library’s first land acknowledgement statement, is the recipient of the Society of American Archivists 2022 Archival Innovator Award, and recently was awarded a $1 million grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for “Firekeepers: Building Archival Data Sovereignty through Indigenous Memory Keeping,” a three-year project to preserve Indigenous knowledge through community-based participatory archival partnerships with Arizona’s Tribal communities. Alex’s journey to librarianship comes after years of success as a touring hip-hop musician and activist.
Bethany Maureen Leonardi [biography]

Bethany Leonardi has had a passion for research from the moment she entered university. She obtained her Bachelor of Science in Forensic Science from Arizona State University where she contributed to her first published research project. She then achieved her Master of Arts in Library and Information Science from the University of Arizona. While completing her MLIS, she contributed to a research project concerning locating Native American research in engineering databases. During this time she realized that she had an interest and a talent for coding which she is currently pursuing independently.

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