ATLA, WorldCat, and ILL--a researcher's best friends

[Taran Wanderer]

In your research, do you get bogged down in the source finding stage? Why spend agonizing hours poring over bibliographies in random books when you could have all the sources you need right at your fingertips? Introducing the ATLA Religion Database and WorldCat! Two resources that will make your life easier (by handing you the relevant references on a silver platter) while simultaneously making it harder (by giving you a lot more to read than you had before)!

"Now, what are these things?" you ask. The ATLA Religion Database is an immense database of religion books and articles, a product of the American Theological Library Association. You can do some fairly advanced searches on it, but it's fairly easy to use. Each item is cataloged with subject information as well as author, title, journal, etc., so it's easy to find whatever you need on the topic you're studying. Not only that, but you can even e-mail the search results to yourself!

WorldCat is a huge, worldwide database that combines the catalogs of over 9,000 libraries that are members of OCLC, the Online Computer Library Center. If you're looking for a subject, this will tell you what books (and even videos and other media) have been published on it. If you're looking for a book, this will tell you where you can find it. And just as with ATLA, you can e-mail the search results.

"Wow, that's great," you're saying. "How can I access these incredible resources?" I'm glad you asked. If you live near an academic library, they might subscribe to ATLA, in which case you can plunk yourself down in front of their public access computers and search away! You might even be able to access it from off campus, though you might have to be a student to do that. Ask the reference librarian.

I'd guess that most libraries these days will provide access to WorldCat. If you don't live near a college or seminary, ask at your public library. Again, you might even be able to search from home.

If by some stroke of misfortune you have no easy access to either of these, there's still hope! Google Scholar will give you enough references to keep you busy, and OCLC has partnered with Google and Yahoo to bring you Open WorldCat! If you don't feel like bookmarking the Open WorldCat page, you can search it by typing site:worldcatlibraries.org in your Google or Yahoo search along with your other search terms.

"That's all good, but what's that other thing you mentioned in the thread title?" You mean ILL? What a good question! You thought your fun ended when you found that long list of references for your research project, but there's more! If there aren't any libraries near you that carry the items you need, you can request them over interlibrary loan. The library will request the item (book, article, CD, whatever) from other libraries, and in all likelihood, within a couple of weeks the item will be delivered to your library, which will loan it out to you. Your library's ILL office can give you more details. Also make sure that you're talking to the ILL office at your main library rather than a library where you're a guest patron because a lot of libraries don't do ILLs for guests.

There are many other research databases out there. If you're looking for psychology articles, the one you want is PsychINFO. If it's news, you want the LexisNexis. Does anybody have others to recommend? (JP Holding, I'm looking at you.)

[BronzeArcher]

Thanks. I searched for WorldCat on my uni's library site, and there's a date beside the entry... "1000 BC -" But I have access to it.

Does PsycINFO have cross-cultural psych stuff?

[Taran Wanderer]

Does PsycINFO have cross-cultural psych stuff?

Yes. Their journal coverage list is here, and it includes journals like Cross-Cultural Research: The Journal of Comparative Social Science, the Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, the International Journal of Intercultural Relations, and the Journal of Cognition and Culture. You'll also probably want to look at articles in anthropology and maybe sociology, and it covers those journals too.

AND I forgot to mention earlier that for a lot of journals, ATLA includes the full text of the articles! The text isn't searchable, though, because they've just scanned the pages as images. PsychINFO only has article abstracts, but they explain ways to find full-text articles here.

[kiwimac]

As a former ILL librarian, may I recommend this service?

Kiwimac

[Michael-C]

LexisNexis also has searches for statistics. For science articles, there's PubMED, which is freely available, and Medline, available through OCLC (check at a local university).

I might also add that some libraries have reciprocal borrowing agreements with other libraries so you can go directly to the other library and check out materials. For example, there are over 500 libraries in the Illinois Intersystem Reciprocal Borrowing Covenant, including the massive Chicago Public Library. Don't be fooled by your local libraries holdings: Your access to information may be much larger than you expected. Ask a reference librarian about reciprocal borrowing agreements and other ways you can use other local or regional libraries.

Libraries are wonderful institutions. I think it's a shame that so many people don't know how to maximize their usefulness.

Michael C.

[Taran Wanderer]

LexisNexis also has searches for statistics. For science articles, there's PubMED, which is freely available, and Medline, available through OCLC (check at a local university).

Looks like it's only medicine-related sciences. But it's nice that it's freely available.

I might also add that some libraries have reciprocal borrowing agreements with other libraries so you can go directly to the other library and check out materials.

Oh yes. Good point.

[Taran Wanderer]

As a former ILL librarian, may I recommend this service?

Yes you may! (I was an assistant ILL coordinator for a few years. )

[Michael-C]

Looks like it's [PubMed] only medicine-related sciences. But it's nice that it's freely available.

Technically, yes, it's only "medicine"-related sciences, but medicine touches a lot of sciences, and PubMed indexes a lot of general science journals (not just journals with medical foci), including things like the Journal of Physics.

Michael

[Taran Wanderer]

WorldCat now has a free, public version of its service at http://www.worldcat.org/. You can look up books and other media and find out if they're at a library near you. It also links to the item's page on Amazon so you can buy it if you want.

[kiwimac]

I use Worldcat all the time.