Here's a brief catalog of links that you may find useful in locating literature in computer science and engineering. Please note that access to papers through some of these sites may be restricted to Washington University IP addresses, so fire up your remote desktop or use an SSH proxy if you're at home. The Wash U. Library also offers a proxy server for off-campus access to IP-restricted subscriptions.
Here are three sites that are gateways to a large subset of CSE conference proceedings. They also link to numerous journals.
If you are looking for proceedings that are not published by one of these organizations, start by doing a Google search for the conference. Alternatively, you can use DBLP (see below) to find out who publishes a given proceedings, then go to the publisher's site to find out if it is available online.
Google Scholar is an excellent place to search for papers by topic or author, and to follow citations forward and backward from a given paper. In the days before Google and other free services, these kinds of searches could only be done via commercial databases such as ISI's Web of Science, INSPEC, or SCOPUS. INSPEC includes bibiographic data back to 1898, so if you're looking for older stuff (including some important theory papers from the 1940's through the 1980's), you may want to check there. The other databases go back to the 1960's or 1970's.
CiteSeer collects publicly available online versions of research papers. It has its own search facility and web-of-citation function. CiteSeer is frequently linked from results returned by Google Scholar.
DBLP is an extensive, automatically constructed database of biblographic information on computer science papers. It does not link to the paper text but is a great resource for finding other papers in the same conference or by the same authors as a given work.
PubMed is NIH's database of journal papers related to biomedical research, including computational biology. Database entries often contain direct links to the journal in which the paper appeared. Increasingly, papers that appear in MedLine searches will have freely available full text, thanks to an NIH mandate that all work funded by them must be publicly accessible.
The Washington University Library is your source for books and journal back-issues. If you are looking for a particular book, journal issue, or proceedings, check their catalog, or start with their FindIt! search page that also checks a number of available bibliographic databases.
Our library provides several kinds of interlibrary loan services, at little or no cost to you, to obtain books or articles to which it does not currently have rights.
While our library maintains copies of all dissertations done at Wash U, if you need to find a dissertation from another school, you might start with the ProQuest or WorldCat catalogs.
The following sites provide ratings/rankings of conference quality in CS. They are useful, especially as a first approximation, but should be treated with some healthy skepticism.
Beware of "junk" conferences, which are often run solely for profit and are minimally peer-reviewed. Osmar Zaiane's site lists some of these; see also this page.