Wednesday, February 08, 2006

Industrious ILL!

We can't pay these people enough in my book! As a distance student, I am surviving by the graces of the ILL staff here at Pierce and at the Buley Library at my grad school, Southern Connecticut State University. I am writing a paper on Sarah Byrd Askew, an early library pioneer during the New Deal (she is fascinating!) and her writings are hard to secure and so are the reference books with biographical information. On several occasions, they have found just the article I needed!

However, sometimes I create more work for them than necessary because I cannot see the table of contents to guarantee if Sarah Askew is listed. The entire reference book comes in (some of them are huge!) for no reason. I check the table of contents and if she is not there....back to its home it goes creating a lot of work for the ILL folks for my five minutes of scanning.

Enter a solution! Google Books! Go to http://books.google.com and type in the title of the book you want to use. Try "Book Lust" as a demo if you can't think of anything. As soon as the cover of the book appears, the Table of Contents is on the top left in the navigation page. Cool? Yes. No more asking for a book through ILL without knowing if it will really help me!

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