Shopping for Resources

Many librarians, when ‘shopping’ for resources, will likely consider ‘recommendation’ lists and reviews. Here are a few that I browse:

Book TV is a service of C-SPAN.org and is self-described as “Television for Serious Readers.” Consistent with its sponsor, C-SPAN, Book TV covers primarily current politics or political history formatted as videotaped interviews.  New York Times Book Review includes reviews and best-seller lists from several different genres from Hardcover Fiction to Children’s Picture Books.

Books We Love, a Web resource from National Public Radio (is a catalog of book titles with brief critiques of each; it is most definitely one of my go-to resources.  The list is 2800 titles long going back to works first published in 2013.  The site’s editors have organized the collection by year of publication and then classified by either genre or by a short description. Two such descriptions that non-librarians can especially appreciate are Seriously great writing and Rather long.

I also check out the offerings of a number of Academic Presses, including UNM, the University of Nebraska, the University of Oklahoma and the University of Arizona.  Each of these entities market its published titles.

Lately, we have encouraged campus users to request that specific titles be added to our collection.  Consider shopping on these sites and select something for our library. It’s your library too.

Best,

Jim Fisk MA MLS

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Undermining History

  There is a common phrase that I believe to be absolute truth. “Those that do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” Unfortunately, there is another phrase this becoming more relevant and for the wrong reasons, “History is written by the victors.” We are living in a time where some people in power are afraid of the history that has shaped our country. All civilizations throughout history have had blackspots or moments that they are not proud of. These moments help define and even can help direct the direction that civilization will go. Those that learn and adapt, will grow and move beyond that blackspot. Our country is no exception. Our history is filled with negative moments that show us in a less than ideal light. However, learning from these moments to be better and to strive to do better is what is going to keep our country moving forward. Yet, there are so many that would rather sweep these moments under a rug and forget that they happened. Take this example fro...
Read more

Free eBook Collections

  The Web Wrap for 8/26/2022 As a student, I grew up in a print world where a research paper meant trips across campus to the college library, sometimes while enduring Minnesota winter.  Books were the primary resource; searching for journal articles meant thumbing through print indexes, and journals stayed in the library (typically in a basement) bound and quite heavy to carry. Recently, I spent some in time exploring the administrative functions of our library catalog while searching for free eBook collections (also known as open access). These are the collections I found: The  Bloomsbury Collections ,  a London publisher and distributor of scholarly digital content defines  Open Access   (OA) as “scholarly works that are free to access, share, and re-use. ”  Of some 11,000 titles In the Bloomsbury collections are some  300 eBooks , Bloomsbury is committed to adding an increasing number of open access books. To locate the limited number of open ...
Read more

Bad Sources = Bad Information

 We live in a time where it is very easy for anyone to share their ideas and opinions on absolutely anything. Our deep educational experiences have ingrained in us the thought that if we read something in the open media, then it must have credibility because it is "published." However, being accessible and being published are very different things and in today's information bonanza, neither equates to credible. There has been a lot of bas information in the media lately, and I'm not speaking about national news sources. I'm referring to the increased amount of personal news reporting that we see on social media and click bait news. Any time there is a national tragedy in our country, there are those that have a need to speak their mind, no matter the truth or facts. However, many people will interpret this information as factual, "its on the internet, it must be true." We see this with every mass shooting that takes place, the recent tragedy in Texas is ...
Read more