Wednesday 13 June 2007

The Wired Scholar and Google Books


I have not been catching up with much reading recently, so I decided to visit the website of the Society of Biblical Literature to see if there is anything new there. I am not disappointed every time I go to SBL website.

The latest May 2007 Forum contains a very interesting post by Danny Zacharias on The Wired Scholar: Five Free Tools You May Not Know About.

Of particular interest is the highlight of Google Books. I have not been using Google Books for a while, and thought that it is worth trying out again. I am surprised at the amount of books in biblical studies that have been digitalised since my last visit and are now made available publicly. I did a quick advanced search on "Corinthians", an area of my own research interest, and it returned 1,164 titles.

Of course, full view are available only for some 22 books (e.g., Hodge's 2 Corinthians; Barnes' 2 Corinthians) while limited view for many others (e.g., I was looking in vain for some of these books but I found them here: Gooch's Dangerous Food; Holleman's Resurrection and Parousia; Kovacs' 1 Corinthians; and Smit's About the Idol Offering). The limited view gives one a rather limited idea of what a book is about but this may be sufficient for some books. For example, it gives about 25pp. of Furnish's Theology of First Letter to the Corinthians, out of a total of 173pp.; and 40pp. of Matera's commentary on II Corinthians. Not a bad deal, especially if your library does not carry the titles found in the limited view. Who knows, you might only need those pages that are available online!

Zacharias also highlights two "under construction" web pages dedicated to pointing out biblical studies works that are freely available, mostly from Google Books. While most of these works are now in the public domain, the list contains some recent books as well. Check out the following lists:

  1. The first is maintained by Mischa Hooker from the University of Memphis.

  2. The second is a joint collaborative efforts by Bob Buller and Zacharias himself.
There is less excuse now for students to complain about the difficulty in obtaining books that are not available in the library, and hence not referring to them in their essays/thesis.

Read the rest of Zacharias' article here.

2 comments:

pearlie said...

There is less excuse now for students to complain about the difficulty in obtaining books that are not available in the library, and hence not referring to them in their essays/thesis.

We must know where to look :)
I also found another way to prove that if we try hard enough, we can get what we need: I did a search on what I needed. Got what I can from Google Books and where I cannot I checked out www.libarything.com to see who got them. I sent at least 7-10 of them a mail to see if they are free enough to scan and send me the missing few pages. I got such help, both times I tried it. They are truly good brothers :)

Kar Yong said...

Thanks, Pearlie, for the tip. It shows that if there's will, there's a way.