Techniques to characterize the properties of materials whose characteristic dimensions are a few to a few hundred nanometers, including conventional nanocrystalline materials, but concentrating on novel nanomaterials: carbon nanotubes, quantum dots, quantum wires, and quantum wells are covered. The emphasis is on recent results from the scientific literature concerning those properties that make nanostructures interesting: quantum effects, novel transport phenomena, enhanced mechanical properties associated with localization and with small crystallite size.