LESSON 3 - Book Reviews
The material you have found in the Holocaust Encyclopedia looks interesting, and you would like to utilize a great deal of the information in your paper. Before making this research the cornerstone of your paper, however, you may want to see how the reference was reviewed by scholars.
Book Reviews
Where will you look? If your first thought is Book Review Digest (Reference 028.1 B724d) or Book Review Index (Reference 028.1 B724i), bravo! Book Review Digest and Book Review Index are standard reference sources which can be used to locate reviews not only on the Holocaust Encyclopedia but also on the many books suggested in the bibliographies.
Many different book review sources now appear on the Internet. The New York Times Book Review has a searchable database going back to 1996 which also features author interviews and special web archival, multimedia features on figures such as Ernest Hemingway, Bob Dylan, Charles Lindberg, and Gore Vidal. Other individual reviewing publications can be located through sites such as SUNY Albany Library's Book reviews, but journal article databases or print collections allow you to search many review sources at one time.
Let's use a database to find a review of the The Holocaust Encyclopedia .
If other databases are not available, excerpts from book reviews may also be found at commercial web sites like Amazon and Barnes and Noble. For research purposes, it is best to use only those book reviews reprinted from magazines and journals. Book reviews at commercial web sites must be used with caution because some of the book reviews that they post are really advertisements for the books that they are selling. These sites also post reviews written by customers. Customers are entitled to their opinions but may have no qualifications to review books.
