Taking advantage of academic resources

Last week, OmniTI hosted a pretty awesome conference about scalability called Surge. I really enjoyed John Allspaw's keynote in which he spoke about the importance of looking to academia and different fields to help solve some of the problems we face with upcoming web technologies and in general. I completely agree and while I do a little of this already, I hope to delve into it more. I'd like to share some of the resources I am currently using and hope that others will find them useful and be able to point me in the direction similar useful resources we can all use to find papers and articles pertaining to the problems we are trying to solve on the web.