Answer: How to find the conference proceedings?

The simplest way to start this quest is by just looking around a bit to see where the canonical version of the proceedings resides.  So I started with the easiest possible query:

     [ “user interface software and technology” ]

I put it in double quotes because these are all very common words that will often appear in nearly this sequence.  But I wanted EXACTLY this sequence of words--hence the double quotes. 

This is what I found. 

shows us quickly that this is an ACM (Association for Computing Machinery) conference, and that the website for this organization is ACM.org in the /UIST directory.  

If you then click on the “More results from ACM.org >>” button:

Note that what this does it to add the site:acm.org filter to the query.  Handy. 

What’s great about this set of results, though, is that since they use words like "archive" in their URLs, it’s pretty clear they’ll have a collection of the proceedings.  So I added the term proceedings to my original query:

     [ “user interface software and technology” proceedings ]

This is pretty darn close to what I was looking for—a complete listing of the all the proceedings. 

Pay attention to what happens if you click through on one of those "Proceedings" link, you'll see: 

This is the top-level entry at the ACM Digital Library page for the UIST conference.  As you'll see, there's a wealth of information here.  Excellent work. 

But first, let's check to see what we can find at Google Scholar.  Can we get to the papers via open access?  

If we go to Scholar and do the query:

     [site:acm.org "user interface software and technology” proceedings ]

what we get are the papers from the conference (not the master collection of papers for each conference).  Why?  Because each paper has in its citation list a mention of "proceedings of the User Interface Software and Technology conference."  

However, notice the [PDF] from foo.edu on the right column?  That’s a link to an openly accessible copy of the paper.  That is, if you find that link there, you don’t need to be a member of the ACM to be able to read the paper.  (This is a very useful trick to remember:  authors frequently put out pre-publication versions of their articles for just this reason.  They’re not the copyrighted version, but usually an earlier version for colleagues and students to refer to.)  This might not get you 100% of all the papers published in a proceedings, but in some communities (e.g., the UIST community), they're mostly out there.  

To pop back to our task for a second, if we’re still looking for an easy way to find ALL the proceedings, we can just click through to the proceedings page at the ACM Digital Library (DL), then click on the “Table of Contents” tab, and find that they’ve handily linked the preceding and next proceedings to each of the adjoining conferences! 

For the extra credit problem, the one extra trick to employ is to figure out what THEY call themselves on the web.  In this case, doing a search for “American Society for Information Science and Technology” shows you that they’re called ASIS and their content resides at the ASIS.org site.  The same procedure illustrated above will get you to their contents as well. 

Search lessons:  When you're looking for a collection of proceedings (say, an archival collection), it's often useful to figure out what organization is hosting the conference.  In this case, it was the ACM.  So, looking in the ACM Digital Library is awfully handy.  In this case, they provide a previous/next way to walk through the collection from beginning to end.  

On the other hand, if you want the master list of all the links to all the proceedings, then a conference specific title search (with double quotes) and a context term like "proceedings" will get you want you need.  

Search on!