Top Shelf

by Laura Galvan-Estrada and Sidney Laramie, SWC Librarians

Top Shelf is a weekly column where librarians share some of their favorite resources with you.

E-Book Selection
My selection for Top Shelf is the Handbook of Psychology (Wiley, 2003) available through our netlibrary subscription. It is a multivolume set, with a total of 12 volumes covering the field of psychological science and practice. Each volume is a separate entitity in netlibrary. For some reason, Volume 2 is not in the netlibrary collection – at least not in our subscription.

The volumes are as follows:
v. 1. History of psychology
v. 2. Research methods in psychology
v. 3. Biological psychology
v. 4. Experimental psychology
v. 5. Personality and social psychology
v. 6. Developmental psychology
v. 7. Educational psychology
v. 8. Clinical psychology
v. 9. Health psychology
v. 10. Assessment psychology
v. 11. Forensic psychology
v. 12. Industrial and organizational psychology

Each volume is truly a wealth of information. Each has its own experts in the field as editors, with experts writing the individual entries within the volumes. Each article is well cited and each volume has its own author and subject indices. The information within each volume is very well organized, easy to find and access.

The set doesn’t contain a cumulative index to all the volumes. For a beginner user who may not know where his specific subject might be found, this is a major drawback (especially when dealing the an e-book format). But then again, we (librarians) might be the only users looking for a cumulative index J

Aside from the usual nuisances of handling electronic books, netlibrary does not list the titles in numerical order, which would be nice. You doesn’t get a sense of how many volumes there are unless you scroll down the screen or read the preface in one of the books. And, of course, for some reason, volume 2 is missing.

Overall, as a reference tool, I think the contents of this set are absolutely outstanding. For me, it was a nice gem to find. And, as it turns out, we don’t own a paper copy of this expensive set, so it is a nice resource to know no matter which library we happen to be staffing! Enjoy.

E-books are available to all SWC students, faculty, and staff. Read our Remote Access webpage for information about accessing e-books from home.

-Laura.


Website Selection
www.whichbook.net
Whichbook.net

British librarians have a fascinating idea for helping people find “which book to read” although it’s not real practical at this point. While the graphics version is more fun it is definitely much harder to use than the text-only version, and it has more problems. Checking out the “how to use” demo also facilitates use of the site, especially if you want to try the “graphic version”.

Either mode presents the user with a choice between selecting the mood or style of a book or picking plot type, attributes of the main character, and a setting. For the first option the user is given a choice of twelve continuums between two opposing descriptors. Examples include “beautiful” vs. “disgusting”; “easy” vs. “demanding”; “larger the life” vs. “down to earth”; “short” vs. “long”; and “conventional” vs. “unusual”. It is also possible to specify audio book or large print. The main character may be defined by race, sexuality, age and gender, and plot options include “success against the odds”, “quest”, “revelations”, and “generations”.

Search results which match the parameters chosen are presented differently depending on which type of search you use. Usually there is a comment at least about the best match, parallel works are given and sometimes extracts.

-Sidney.