Landscape Architecture: Recommended Resources

AGRICOLA (AGRICultural OnLine Access) serves as the catalog and index to the collections of the National Agricultural Library, as well as a primary public source for world-wide access to agricultural information. The database covers materials in all formats and periods, including printed works from as far back as the 15th century.

Birkhäuser Building Types Online is a resource for the study and practice of architectural design. It is based on the publisher's high international standing in professional architecture books, on the knowledge of the authors and editors who are leading experts in their fields, as well as on the technical quality of the illustrations. The database offers highly flexible and detailed search and browse access to the contents of the Birkhäuser program on building types. All content was written and selected by internationally renowned authors in architectural design.

Environment Complete contains more than 1,957,000 records from more than 1,700 domestic and international titles going back to the 1940s (including 1,125 active core titles) as well as more than 120 monographs. The database also contains full text for more than 680 journals, including many of the most used journals in the discipline, such as Environment (back to 1975), Ecologist, Conservation Biology, etc. Additionally, Environment Complete provides full text for 120 monographs, such as Encyclopedia of World Environmental History (3 volumes), Advances in Water Treatment & Environmental Management, etc.

Garden, Landscape & Horticulture Index covers a wide range of serial titles including general gardening titles of national, international, and regional interest, and titles devoted to specialty gardens and plant groups. Indexed and abstracted are more than 500 core titles, the majority of which are published in English. Coverage for many titles extends back further than a decade. Garden, Landscape & Horticulture Index brings together articles about plants and gardens into a single source, and it includes titles that are not available in any other index.

The GeoRef database includes references to all publications of the U.S. Geological Survey. Masters' theses and doctoral dissertations from US and Canadian universities are also covered.

To maintain the database, GeoRef editor/indexers regularly scan more than 3,500 journals in 40 languages as well as new books, maps, and reports. They record the bibliographic data for each document and assign index terms to describe it. Each month between 4,000 and 7,000 new references are added to the database.

ProQuest Deep Indexing: Earth Sciences supplements GeoRef with access to deep indexing for tables, figures, graphs, charts and other illustrations from the scholarly research and technical literature for selected records. Records from the database appear with searches of GeoRef to provide an additional path for discovery.

Major areas of coverage include:

Human Population Dynamics
Population - Environment Relations
Population Statistics and Policy
Ecotourism
Sustainable Living and Consumption
Environmental Awareness and Education
Environmental Law, Conventions, & Policy
Sustainable Resource Base: Atmosphere; Land; Water and Biodiversity
Economic Drivers
Sustainable Development and Production
Sustainable Energy
Sustainable Transportation/Mobility

Virginia Tech's open access institutional repository, publicizes and preserves the scholarly work of Virginia Tech faculty, students, and staff: journal articles, books, theses, dissertations, conference papers, slide presentations, technical reports, working papers, administrative documents, videos, images, and more. Most content is recent, published within the last 15 years, but there is also a great deal of older and historical content. The full text of all documents is available, often in PDF format, and all entries are indexed by search engines such as Google Scholar and Discovery Search. Any member of the Virginia Tech community can upload material to VTechWorks.
How VTechWorks benefits researchers

Research in VTechWorks is widely disseminated, free to anyone in the world with an Internet connection.
Research in VTechWorks is easily discovered, since it is indexed in Google Scholar, WorldCat, the Virginia Tech website, and the Library's Discovery.
Research in VTechWorks has increased impact: many studies show that openly accessible research is more frequently cited by journalists and scholars than research published in journals and books that must be paid for.
Research in VTechWorks has a persistent, stable link ("handle") that won't change even when current servers are replaced, which makes it more reliable for others to cite and to share on social media.
Research in VTechWorks will be preserved by the University Libraries for decades or even centuries, unlike research posted on a personal web page or published by a company that might go out of business.
Research in VTechWorks is preserved even if a researcher leaves Virginia Tech, but it can always be posted or published elsewhere, since Virginia Tech does not claim any unnecessary or additional rights to the material.