Save money by using LRC resources!

As a student at SWFC, you have full-text access to over 1,700 publications in the Popular Magazines database in LIRN, found under Gale InfoTrac

Here is a (very!) small sample of the amount of money you can save in yearly subscriptions by using the database.

You can subscribe to a publication's RSS feed or get an email when a new issue is published. If you're unsure how to do this, don't hesitate to ask LRC librarians!

Websites to help you find the right book: Part 3

The website BookLamp.org helps you find reading suggestions similar to the way Pandora helps you find music related to a genre or artist. 

You enter the title of a book into the site's search engine and it performs a computer-based analysis of a book's "DNA," or themes.

To show you what this means, we entered the title Memoirs of a Geisha. The image on the right demonstrates how the website evaluates "StoryDNA." This book has strong themes of family connections / childhood relationships, social gatherings, and elements of time. The bar for clothing / fabrics is also high.

Other examples include John Grisham's The Confession, which rates high for criminal investigations and legal affairs. Erik Larson's In the Garden of Beasts featured social discourse, correspondence / letter writing, and parties / events.

Once you've selected a title, it will provide you with reading suggestions. Recommended titles often have similar StoryDNA and may be related to or by the same author. The reading suggestions for Memoirs of a Geisha are shown on the left.

Websites to help you find the right book: Part 2

This week, we're going to focus on a website from experts in academia and literature! The database Books & Authors was created by GALE Cengage and features over 146,000 titles recommended by librarians and other experts. It also contains biographies of over 54,000 authors.

Nonfiction titles include business, biographies, health / science, and more. Its fiction titles are also separated into categories and feature historical fiction, fantasy, western, mystery, etc.

This site helps you keep track of what you've read and want to read by allowing you to log-in and create a personal reading room. You can mark and create lists of titles or rate and review books.

In order to help you narrow down searches, they've created a search tool called Who, What, Where, When? (WWWW). You can search for a type of character, a subject, the location, and the time period.

We did a sample search about nursing/nurses in the United States during the 21st century. Here's what it looked like:

You can see it gave us 27 final results because we were so specific. We could change our search terms to get more results, or click on the total to be shown our recommendations.