Friday, December 2, 2011

e-books, e-articles, e-serendipity

We recently added an e-books and articles section to the Law Subject Guide.
It's designed to help you find something useful when you don't know exactly what you are looking for.
There are links to several publishers' sites (Cambridge, Hart, Oxford, Wiley) so you get some brand recognition and a relatively small pool of material to look at. You can search or browse. Often you can branch out into their other subject areas - philosophy or ethics or medicine, for example - without straying too far from something recognisable. You can get access to online books as well as journals; and you can get advanced (i.e. prepublication) access to some journals.
I think of it as targetted browsing - it's as close as you can get to the traditional print browsing experience, when you saw only high-quality academic sources relating to your discipline, and browsing was a legitimate and necessary part of your academic work.

There are other ways to find clusters like these.
You could start with the e-journals/e-books page; explore the subject index or browse the long list of clusters. Many of these sites also allow you to set up table of contents alerts and/or saved searches, so once you find something useful, it just gets better.

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