11. Materials data

The world's literature is listed in specialized collections (Ceramics abstracts, Glass file, Rapra, KKF, Surface coating, Engineered Material Abs, Paperchem, Adhemix...). Users are generally looking for material properties. These are collected in factual databases, which may be grouped together under a common structure and a multibase search system (MPD Material property data and Numeriguide on STN Int). There are also specialized networks and expert systems that can be queried via telematics (minitel) or microcomputers. A look at the lists in the article Factual information resources [1] shows the diversity of sources in terms of specialization.