Google book search – virtual reference!
I was looking for a particularly obscure book, – Organisation and management of Asylums (title as given by borrower) and was having no joy on our usual databases. So googled it.
I then had some references at the top of the page from Google’s book search. Other results didn’t seem, at a quick glance, to be useful, so I thought well why not?
Top of the list was this: Catalog of the Robert L. Sadoff Library of Forensic Pyschiatry and Legal Medicine and on page 55 is a reference to a similar book by the same author, but with elements of the title in a different place Lunatic Asylums, their organisation and management. Turns out this was the one the borrower was after, published date matched, but the title reference had been erroneous!
Often in the past, I have found that one way of finding a reference to an obscure book is to use search engines to find bibliographies or reading lists for related subjects. Now with Google Book Search I can try to find stuff in printed bibliographies too.
Perhaps using an advanced search, I could limit to results with bibliography or catalogue or catalog etc in the title. What would be neater is to be able to select the type of work to limit my search to. Fiction? non-fiction? or better still perhaps I could limit by classification (Dewey, LC).
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