The Institution of Civil Engineers has launched ICE Virtual Library, with Institution journal and book content going back to 1836. It’s available at www.icevirtuallibrary.com. Yes, it is a premium service, but I found its keyword search to be useful enough even if you haven’t ponied up any money.

The front page has a basic keyword search though there’s also an advanced search page that offers you a number of field searching options, years to search by, content type (books or journals), subjects, etc. I did a plain keyword search for infrastructure. I got over 1800 results listed by relevance as a default, with my keyword highlighted.

Results include title of the article, author, and source. If you click on the title you’ll get a few more details about the article along with a set of keywords relevant to the article and an abstract about the article. I found the abstract with the keywords enough information that I could go see if my local library had the article, or I could take some interesting keywords and expand my search via a general search engine.

Hey, as long as you’re here check the bottom of the front page to see the most popular articles on the site (“Introduction of steel columns in US buildings, 1862–1920”) and the latest news from the ICE (though that hasn’t been updated since early June.)