Searching within a Book

Here's a tip: If a book does not have a subject index, try searching for it in Google Books. If it has been indexed by Google Books, then you can search within the text of the book. The search results will point you to page numbers on which your search term appears, effectively serving as an index. I did this recently with Acquisition and Loss of Nationality, Vol. 1: Comparative Analyses, a 499- page book with no index. I had the book in hand but I wasn't inclined to read the entire text in order to locate references to "statelessness"!

Amazon.com offers a similar "search inside this book" feature; here's a link to the same book for comparative purposes.

Recommended Reading Lists

The Refugee Council recently created a web page with their recommendations for novels and biographies on the refugee experience. There are a number of web tools available that make it easy to set up personalized lists of recommended readings, whether they be for the general public, friends, work colleagues, or fellow researchers.

Amazon.com
- Online seller of books and many other products. Learn how to create a list of books that you find interesting and wish to share with other Amazon users. Here's one example: "Teaching Children about Refugees."

CiteULike.org
- Described as a free online service for helping you to organize your academic papers. It works like this: "When you see a paper on the web that interests you, you can click one button and have it added to your personal [CiteULike] library." You can add tags to each entry (see the articles that have been tagged "refugees") as well as build a bibliography.

Google Books
- Google's book search engine allows you to create your own library which you can share with friends and colleagues. Read the My Library FAQ to get started.

Worldcat.org
- A database of bibliographic records from library collections around the world. A sample reading list is provided on the home page, along with instructions on how to set up your own list.

Wish List: RSS Feeds for New Book Titles

In an earlier post, I noted that Kumarian Press did not provide notification services and therefore represented a good candidate for "watching" via a web page monitoring service. As it happens, Kumarian Press now offers an RSS feed to inform users of its news and activities. (For example, I learned about the new classroom guide developed for Larry Minear's book, The Humanitarian Enterprise, from the feed.) Unfortunately, the RSS feed does not include a new book listing. Or at least, not so far.

KP is not alone. This LLRX.com article laments the fact that very few legal publishers offer RSS feeds of new titles. And my previously-posted brief listing of forced migration publishers suggests a parallel tendency to offer email updates over RSS feeds. One notable exception is Brill/Martinus Nijhoff, which offers an RSS feed for its "Refugees and Human Rights" series, as well as feeds for both forthcoming and newly available titles in various subject areas, including "human rights and humanitarian law."

In the meantime, my personal solution for keeping up with new books is to generate customized feeds for various keyword searches undertaken in Amazon.com, the online bookseller. I explain in this post how I then display the titles in the "new books" feature I make available in my other blog, Forced Migration Current Awareness.