Thanksgiving, Lila Style

Lila is grateful for information and, more specifically, the information sources and resources she uses on a daily basis. In celebration of the holiday, she asked other library peeps to name a reference set, database, website, book or other information resource for which they are thankful.

Tim: I appreciate all the music databases on a case by case basis, but I’m always thankful for being able to use Cubcat for searching contents of CDs and printed music collections by using keyword (with quotes for more than one word, of course) and quick limits to recordings, scores, books, etc. Keyword and Boolean searching have greatly improved music searching.

Dawn: I am grateful for allrecipes.com I don’t really use it so much for myself as for preparing food for others. I can grab recipes on demand for events here at the library, meals with friends and family, and gift giving. I am also on the food ministries team at church. Options like including or excluding ingredients and changing the measurements to meet your quantity needs are invaluable!

Jenny: Historical New York Times, a database that has the full text of this newspaper from 1850 -2003. That’s every cover story, every advertisement, every comic, every letter to the editor….I could go on. Enter your birthday and limit the document type to Front Page to see what was happening in the world the day you were born. Fun stuff! AND Tennessee Electronic Library, a collection of databases available for free to every person in Tennessee. So, after you graduate from Belmont you can still access ebooks, articles, and more! Find a link to TEL on our Alphabetical List of All Databases page

Ernest: New Interpreter’s Bible set, A number of books in the BL-BX section, Consumer Reports Buying Guide, ATLA database, ProQuest Religion database.

Rachel: Cool digitization projects are sweeping the nation...I can't choose one. Libraries and archives are making documents, maps, books, music, correspondence and more available (and often searchable) online. Need a map of Organized Crime in 1920s Chicago, letters written in the Confederate States of America during the Civil War, photographs of the Japanese-American Internment at Manzanar?

Judy: One tool that I use all the time is the Oxford English Dictionary. When I come across an unfamiliar term in my reading, I go right to the OED and look it up. I also use it to check spelling. The online version is very handy, and fun to use. I especially like the new entries. Sometimes they are quite amusing; one of the latest is “puh-leeze”!

An alternative to Wikipedia?

Scholarpedia and Citizendium and more…

Thanks in part to Mr. Stephen Colbert, the ease with which Wikipedia articles are written/edited/vandalized has been widely scrutinized. While “truthiness” might work for you, it won’t work for your teachers. So you need an alternative, right?

Scholarpedia is an online encyclopedia that is written by experts. Not only do you know the name and credentials of the author responsible for the article, you also can rest assured that the article has been peer-reviewed. However, it is not a general encyclopedia. It only provides coverage of science-related topics and has a fraction of the articles available in Wikipedia.

And then there's Citizendium. Had you forgotten about Citizendium? Yeah, me too. Currently boasting 3,300 articles, Citizendium is Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger's response to the "populist" editorial process of Wikipedia. Like Scholarpedia, the author is identified in Citizendium and the articles are subject to a review process.

You could argue that many Wikipedia articles are also revised, edited, and reviewed by experts. Great. Just keep in mind that these are all encyclopedia articles! College-level research requires that you go beyond encyclopedia articles to analyze actual research and journal articles and books and statistics and primary documents and more.