Tuesday, October 06, 2009

Google Books - Use It

I am guessing that at least some of you are already familiar with this tool, but some may not be: Google books. This tools allows you to search for and view pages from an astonishing number of books. Ihave found this especially helpful as I work on revisions for my dissertation. I come across a book that is referenced and I want to look at it, but my school's library does not have a copy. I could use Interlibrary Loan and wait for several days for the book to arrive. Or, I can search for it in Google Books, find the relevant section, and get what I need in a matter of seconds.

The only downside is that for copyright reasons some pages/sections of some books are omitted. So sometimes the section I want is not available. But in most cases it is. An additional advantage is that if I know that a book is available on Google books I do not need to take the hard copy with me when I travel, thus lightening the load.

If you are familiar with other helpful tools available on the web, feel free to leave them in the comments.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Matt: I found the Google Suite (though becoming a bit Orwellian) an excellent tool suite. I use Google Voice as a home number. This is a great idea for a seminarian, as they can set up a number before leaving school with any area code. They can route every call to either a voice mail in their email inbox, txt message, or to any phone they decide they want it to go to. I use it extensively. I also use the Google Calendar to coordinate the church staff schedules, committees, etc. I have found this invaluable and free! Finally, Google Docs has become home to many developing projects where i am committee member with other District or National people that must work together on one final output. Student groups have used it successfully for projects at Great Commission Bible Institute. Thanks for the review of Google Books.

Unknown said...

Many resources are also available on scribd.com and much of the content can be downloaded as pdf.