The document provides an overview of several open source resources for research including Wikipedia, WorldCat, Google Books, Google Scholar, and others. It discusses the pros and cons of each resource, highlighting how they can be used to find reference information, key sources, journal articles, and books on research topics. Users are encouraged to search each resource for 5 minutes to become familiar with the search functions and information available.

1. Open Source
Koichi Inoue
Subject Librarian
(Humanities & Social Sciences)

2. Wikipedia

3. Wikimedia

4. IMSLP

5. Google Books

6. Project Gutenberg

7. Open Library

8. WorldCat

9. Google Scholar

10. Directory of open access journals

11. Zotero

12. Finding more open source

13. Wikipedia
Pros:
 Good place to gather reference type of
information (you can also check what the rest of
the world already knows about your topic).
 Great place to find key information sources on
your topic.
Cons:
 Inconsistent, sometimes conflicting, information
between pages.
 You cannot cite it in academic writing if you want
to be taken seriously.

14. Glass Menagerie

15. Film and television adaptations

16. Key information sources

18. Disambiguation page

19. 5 min. exercise
 Search on your topic in Wikipedia.

20. WorldCat
Pros:
 World’s largest union catalogue (searches for
books, magazines, DVDs, etc. held in libraries
around the world).
 Uses thesauri (easier to collate material on the
same topic).
 Personal account (can save records and
searches, set up email alerts and RSS
feeds, share you findings with others, etc.)/
Cons:
 No full text available (but you can get them from
our library).
 Keyword searching is weak (no full text

21. Search results

22. Item record

23. Find in a library

24. Similar items

25. Subject limits

26. Format limits

27. 5 min. exercise
 Search on your topic in WorldCat.

28. Google Books
Pros:
 Searches through millions of digitised books
available.
 Full text searching (picks up parts of books really
well. Ex. book chapters and paragraphs).
Cons:
 Returns a huge number of hits, but it is difficult to
narrow down the results.

31. Related books

32. Find in a library & Bib info

33. Google Scholar
Pros:
 Searches through millions of journal articles and
books across all disciples and databases.
 Great tool to find “gray literature” (i.e.
Dissertations,theses, conference pagers, etc.).
 Also great at finding open source journal articles.
Cons:
 Same issue as Google Books – too many hits,
often irrelevant to your topic.

34. 5 min. exercise
 Search on your topic in Google Books and
Google Scholar.

35. Borrow Direct

36. Borrow Direct libraries

37. Borrow Direct title search

38. Make a request

39. What if the Library doesn’t have it?