How to find books.

March 22, 2009 12:55 PM

I've been tasked with finding a bunch of books, and have author names and occasionally publisher, genre or topic. Some of the authors are academics and seem to have published mostly in journals or edited group anthologies. Hælp me you dominators of printed matter, how to find?

This is all loosely architecture related, and the originals are often either Spanish or South/Latin American.

Right now I'm casting a wide net; Googling, checking Amazon and LOC, as well as the Swedish Royal Library (Since I'm ultimately trying to find copies to borrow at my uni) but it takes too much time and yields inconsistent results.

So. How would you go about finding an as complete bibliography of an author as possible, including appearances in group anthologies and by academic presses? Which are the go-to databases one trawls to get an international overview of printed stuff?

posted by monocultured to education (7 comments total)

worldcat.org is a good place to start. This is a "worldwide catalog" that many libraries participate in. This may not help you with some of the anthology stuff if they're just one of a lot of names (catalogers frequently don't provide access to every author in an anthology) but it will probably be the single resource which will get you more hits than anything else. Plus, you may be able to request interlibrary loans to your library directly from the site.
posted by rabbitrabbit at 1:04 PM on March 22 [3 favorites]

Worldcat is it, most certainly.
posted by Ironmouth at 2:30 PM on March 22

Worldcat is a nifty start, thanks! Sorting by language and the quick list creation is a definitive win.

Other suggestions still welcome. Don't any of the desktop reference apps do these kinds of things? Or are those only highly specialised peer-reviewed-paper kind of things?

Looking forward to the our overlord Google Books future though: Ended up at University of London for their thesis publications and a complete overview is still nowhere in sight.
posted by monocultured at 3:24 PM on March 22

If you're only looking for books, worldcat.org will be just fine. You kind of imply, though that you want journal articles too, and it won't help you there. Is your task this: You have a list of authors. For each author, you want to know everything they've ever written, regardless of format?

If so, after you're done checking worldcat.org, find out if your university has access to Avery Index to Architectural Periodicals. You can browse or search by author, and it's international. The description from the architecture librarian at my library reads:

Offers a comprehensive listing of journal articles on architecture and design, including bibliographic descriptions on subjects such as the history and practice of architecture, landscape architecture, city planning, historic preservation, and interior design and decoration. It contains more than 440,000 thousand entries surveying over seven hundred American and international journals. These include not only scholarly and popular periodical literature, but also publications of professional associations, American state and regional periodicals, and the major serials on architecture and design of Europe, Asia, Latin America, and Australia.

Academic databases' usefulness is largely subject-based; if you have non-architecture things to find, I'd recommend other databases, and there are other options if your library doesn't pay for Avery Index. Visit your university library and ask a librarian there what databases are available to help you with this task, they're experts and would be the best ones to help you.
posted by donnagirl at 3:32 PM on March 22

Excellent advice @donnagirl. My task is more or less as you described, i.e. "for each author find everything they've ever written, regardless of format."

I have a hodgepodge of notes, some of which read "everything in English written by Gorelik + article in dædelos/daidalos," with misspelling and whatnots.

My main problem is that many of the writers are interdisciplinary and change working place, making search for academic publications a pain in the arse. I'll be consulting our librarians tomorrow and am checking out Avery Index on your recommendation right now which is accessible from home. Thanks for the advice!
posted by monocultured at 4:00 PM on March 22

scholar.google.com
posted by Hediot at 4:38 PM on March 22

Google Scholar is where I start these days. It will show you previews of articles and books - enough to get the bibliographic information and have a cursory glance at sources to see if they're worth seeking out.

http://scholar.google.com

If you're at university, your school likely has subscriptions to journals related to your field. I would say 90 percent of the articles I used in my MA thesis were available electronically through my school library.

Good luck with it!
posted by futureisunwritten at 2:02 PM on April 3