The Basileiad Library at Manor College. Information Literacy course.  Books.

Books provide the most authoritative and comprehensive source of information for many subjects. In a book the author is able to fully expand on his/her ideas, build on the ideas of others, and point to potential research in the future.

A book will generally provide a comprehensive bibliography, from which you can find starting points for new avenues of research on your subject.

Books are often called primary resources. Primary resources are original starting points for information. A novel is a primary resource, as is a movie, letter or an email from one person to another. Teachers will sometimes ask you to use only primary resources in your assignments. So if the assignment is about a Shakespearean play, you must read the play and not someone's interpretation of it. However, be aware that some people use a different definition of primary resources - they mean a resource that is the starting point of any artistic or intellectual endeavor, that is, the data from which the original resource grew.

Secondary resources are resources that draw on primary resources - a critical review of a book is a secondary resource. A movie review is a secondary source. Secondary resources are always written about primary resources.

Books can take up to eighteen months to be published. This can mean that the information can be out of date. However, the publishers would not publish a book unless they thought it would sell. So if a book gets published it means that the work is going to be useful for some time.

You can locate specific books in the Manor collection by using the Library’s catalog, which can be found by clicking on  'Find Books' on the Library web page. At this point you can enter your keyword or phrase and click on “keyword” to find out what the library holds. If you know the title, you can enter that and click on “title”. The 'Power' searching button allows more search options.

If you are accessing the catalog from home, click on the 'Remote access' link first, enter your Manor user id and password, and then continue as normal.

For each title that interests you, click on 'add to book bag'. Then print this page at the end of your search and take it to the shelves to help you find that book. Each aisle of books has a card on the end, indicating the range of numbers found there.

Books can be published electronically and these are called 'ebooks'. Some books are only available electronically.

A company called netLibrary provides many ebooks to Manor College, which can be accessed from the 'netLibrary E-books' link on the library's web page. netLibrary has many new books available electronically, as well as many old ones. Be warned that the netLibrary search engine is not always accurate with narrow search terms, and it is worth while trying broader search terms to find the book you need.

All electronic book sites look basically the same: they show the contents of the book on the left side of the screen and the book itself on the right. You can go straight to the chapter that interests you, or scroll down to the index and locate your information there. Then key in the page number in the box provided at the top of the screen.

To get the citation details of a book in netLibrary, click on the 'eContent Details' tab at the top of the contents list. There is also a dictionary tab.

If the copyright of a book has expired, anyone can scan the contents to a web page. Many companies have done this, and you can find hundreds of books that have been reproduced on the world wide web by clicking on 'Other ebook websites'. You can find all Shakespeare's plays on the web.

To include a reference in your 'Works Cited' page, see the examples in this series under Section 10: Works Cited.

Apart from using the electronic resources available from Manor College Library's web site, you should also check if there are any services offered by your local public library. Find their web site, and use your library card bar code to access additional electronic resources.

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