TABLE OF CONTENTS The contents list of the massive Congress Proceedings of IFAC, the International Federation of Automatic Control, published triennially since 1960, and the annual proceedings of the American Control Conference may be scanned as a guide to current and past research directions.
Books, including out of print titles, can be discovered by scanning the British Library or Library of Congress data bases and papers can be found from a variety of on-line abstract data bases. I have found the EI- Compendex data base, accessible through the Athens portal, and the public domain 'Citeseer' site to be the most useful.
Many academic library services now offer full text access to a wide range of journals, such as the IEEE range, by access through any networked terminal on campus.
The website of the Control Virtual Library at: http://www.cds.caltech.edu/extras/Virtual_Library/Control_VL.html contains useful information.
