In Praise of Google
For the past year, I’ve been working diligently to compose a senior thesis at Maryville College. The process has been fairly enriching, despite a few setbacks and the almost constant stress of tackling the research and writing process on top of my regular course work. The only thing that has spared my sanity is the amazing resource that is Google.http://laurendukes.blountblogs.com/wp-admin/post-new.php
For the project requiring an extensive amount of research in textbooks and other printed resources, Google Books is an extremely useful tool. Users can do a basic search for archived books and magazines by title, genre, topic, or author’s name. Alternately, the advanced search option can be used to narrow your results by language, publication date, subject, etc. Returned items can be filtered to show only full text books and magazines or may include items that offer a limited preview.
Books and magazines available for browsing in the Google Books search have been archived from high-quality scans, including complete copyright information, the table of contents, and both the front and back covers. In some situations, multiple editions of the same book are available, allowing users to cross-reference materials (which is particularly useful when you’re looking for a certain edition of an anthology or textbook).
Admittedly, I did a lot of research on Google Books over the last year. Nine times out of ten, I could get all the information I needed from very expensive textbooks through limited preview and, on the rare occasions that I actually needed to locate the full text, Google would even help me find a library or bookstore that had the book in stock. How sweet is that?