For the online resources, I chose to explore the Gale Biography Resource. I'm not sure why exactly I chose this, but looking for small biographical articles is something I find myself doing a lot (generally when I'm watching a historical movie or novel, and want to find out more about the real person depicted), so this should be useful enough in the future. This database gives library patrons access to biographical articles from many sources.
First I did a search for Murasaki Shikibu, the author of my favorite book, The Tale of Genji. There was only one article, about 900 words, but it was a pretty good one. I've done tons of research on her because I was always picking her to write papers about in university, and I can say that I only know of one book source that was better than the article retrieved, and it was better than several of the ones I always had to use. Not very much is known about Murasaki's life, after all - not even her real name. And if you click on the tabs in the search results, you can also see magazine articles and websites about the person. There were no magazine articles about Murasaki, but there were a few websites. The most useful one was probably Murasaki's diary, which is in the public domain so translations are available online.
I did a search for Jane Austen next, and of course there were too many results to be counted. Among the long biography articles, I was amused to see a 11,602 word article from the Concise Dictionary of British Literary Biography. I can only wonder what would have been considered not-concise for them.
This is a great resource that I only wish I had known about in high school (if it was around then) and university. Especially problematic is that I'd always pick some obscure topic that it was hard to find sources for. Teachers were always asking for a certain number of sources, with a limit on how many could be online searches. The rest had to be from real books, they'd insist, and I always knew there were sources online that were just as good. Here is the proof - articles from "real" books, but archived online. I'd definitely recommend this to students needing many good sources about subjects for which there may not be many physical books around.
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3 comments:
"The rest had to be from real books, they'd insist..."
You know, there are still public school teachers who things like T.E.L. to be online resources regardless of their source. A lot of the kids get stuck with out-of-date information because they have to use books published ten years ago instead of articles published two years ago and archived online. :-(
I loved Jane's concise entry! That's too funny. :-)
Regarding your comment about Manga.
That's a problem I'm having right now. I know what used to be the big series two years ago when I was buying stuff for myself. But now all I have to go on is what the internet tells me. Lying internet, with it's numbers and facts.
I've actually been thinking about both Paradise Kiss and Nana. I know Paradise Kiss was huge when it first came out and that it still has a lot of fans. And Nana just seemed like an interesting series. I hadn't realized they were by the same author though.
And as far as ratings go, if it's 13+ it's getting cataloged as adult, so parents can't get mad at us. As for 18+, I'm sending that stuff to Linebaugh. They already have some items in that age range, so I don't feel bad ordering them.
Good words.
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