Winona State is one of the few institutions in the United States which has a dedicated Polymer Composite Engineering program. Since the program began in the 1990s, our library has devoted significant resources to building a collection to support that program. That legacy is evident in the number of titles on our retention list that relate to the chemistry and engineering of plastics and composites. Here are two of the many titles:
Lipton, Eldra. Advances and Applications of Rheology. New York: New York Research Press, 2015.
Kamal, Musa R., Avraam I. Isayev, and Shih-Jung Liu. Injection Molding: Technology and Fundamentals. Munich: Hanser, 2009.
Recap: In 2022, twenty-four Minnesota libraries joined together in a commitment to retain over a half-million print books which are scarcely-held in Minnesota. It is called the Minnesota Shared Print Collection. This is one of the stories from the Winona State share of the collection.
Fifty years ago, in 1975, Benoit Mandelbrot coined the word fractal in a French-language book entitled Les Objets Fractals. The term describes geometrical shapes that have fractional dimensions. These mind-bending shapes can make beautiful graphics, because many fractal shapes are self-similar at increasingly small scales.
The original French-language book is so rare, it is only held by two libraries in the world, both in Switzerland. Fractals took off in popularity, though, and none of the English-language books by Mandelbrot held by the Krueger Library are rare enough to be on our retention list. The one book on our retention list that features fractals is a collection of abstracts from a conference where fractals were used to study materials science, such as the fracture mechanics of polymer composites. (The book has no graphics, so I have added below a photo of a fractal shape (creative commons license).
Fractal Aspects of Materials - 1989: Extended Abstracts. Pittsburgh: Materials Research Society, 1989.
Recap: In 2022, twenty-four Minnesota libraries joined together in a commitment to retain over a half-million print books which are scarcely-held in Minnesota. It is called the Minnesota Shared Print Collection. This is one of the stories from the Winona State share of the collection.