New Database Component: Sage Handbook Collection

Sawyer Library was an early adopter of the Sage eReference collection. We have found this extensive set of good quality subject encyclopedias, covering a wide range of topics, to be an excellent source of 24/7 online reference material. The Sage set offers a valuable complement to other wide-ranging eReference collections like our Gale Virtual Reference Library and Credo Reference.

And now, Sage eReference has augmented their encyclopedia sets with an array of their reference handbooks. Sawyer Library has purchased this new collection to give additional depth and breadth to your Sage eReference research options. This online Handbook Collection contains 80 authoritative, award–winning, international and interdisciplinary handbooks across the social sciences--with ever-increasing coverage of business and public management topics, as well as disciplines that Sage has long been known for, like Communication and Sociology. Handbooks cover a great variety of subject areas, including: Advertising, Children, Culture, and Violence, Curriculum and Instruction, Conflict Communication, Disability Studies, Global Supply Chain Management, International Relations, Marketing Research, Political Theory, Public Administration, Social Problems and Transnational Crime & Justice.

From the opening screen, you can browse Encyclopedias or Handbooks separately. Or pick one of the blue-linked subject categories to the right of the homepage to see titles from both the Encyclopedias and Handbooks that are likely to be of use. Of course, you can also just plug a simple keyword search into the search box in the middle of the opening page to search across all content. If you want to limit your search to just handbooks or just encyclopedias, you can pick this as an option in Advanced Search (look for the link below the basic search box). Advanced Search is also where you can cherry-pick just the volumes you want to consult.

Although Advanced Search can be useful in some instances, I have always found the Basic Search on the homepage to do a fine job of relevancy ranking. Usually the items I would most want to see are near the top of the results list. So Sage eReference is one of those electronic resources where a quick search often does the trick in getting several good short overviews of appropriate research topics.

We hope that you find this sizable supplement to Sage eReference useful to your research!

[FIND all of Sage eReference on the "Databases by Subject" List in the left column of our "E-Books" page. ]

Did you know... that Google offers a translation function?

Did you know... that Google offers a translation function that enables the translation of webpages and text into 51 languages? Available languages include those that use non-Roman alphabets, such as Arabic, Chinese and Russian. Users may enter text or a webpage URL (including PDF files posted to the web - such as Library Guides), and then choose the appropriate origin and target languages. Similarly, if you see a Google Translate widget on a website (as, for example, on this blog), then you can have the entire page translated instantaneously, ... into German or Icelandic for example!

How good are the translations? Well, they are not perfect, and they often need a good deal of proofreading and polishing, but they are fast. Google Translate is likely to be the most useful, when one needs help understanding text written in a language that the user has at least some familiarity with.