knovel Has Answers for Scientists and Engineers

Bill Woishnis '80 is a co-founder of knovel Corp., an online database that offers rapid access to more than 450 scientific and engineering reference sources through a single interface. With more than 200 subscribing organizations, including WPI, MIT, Cornell and Princeton on the academic front, and corporate clients such as 3M, GE, GM, Hewlett-Packard and ExxonMobil, he's tapping into a rapidly growing market for e-books.

As chairman and editor in chief of knovel, Woishnis is responsible for knovel's content acquisition and development. "I came into publishing without even knowing I was doing it," he says. "My interest has always been in delivering information electronically." As a plastics engineer at Hewlett-Packard in the early 1980s, Woishnis began gathering and marketing industry data in loose-leaf binders. He later became director of sales for the online version of Plastics Technology magazine. He launched knovel in 1999, and founded its parent company, William Andrew Publishing, based in Norwich, N.Y., in 1990.

Woishnis returned to campus in January to lead a tutorial on knovel's interactive features. Users can search a rapidly growing list of reference manuals, including old standbys such as Perry's Chemical Engineers' Handbook and Marks' Standard Handbook for Mechanical Engineers. But unlike the print version, the data in "live" tables can be searched, sorted, printed and exported to a variety of spreadsheet, calculation and word processing programs.

WPI students and faculty can access knovel.com on their PCs via the Gordon Library site. Systems/Reference librarian Don Richardson says knovel is a unique resource because it focuses on handbooks and other reference books in subjects important to scientists and engineers, and because it covers books from multiple publishers. "knovel's search capabilities allow users to dig deep through a large number of books to locate very specific information," he says. "It's a great example of how the library utilizes Web technology to deliver high-quality scientific and technical resources to our users wherever they are located." --JKM

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Last modified: Sep 02, 2004, 10:13 EDT