South Dakota Library Challenge, Lesson 5

This lesson was about NetLibrary. This is another resource that I have used occasionally but not extensively. For me it has been a great place to check out "how-to" books, since sometimes you just need one little thing and don't want to buy the whole book just to find out one small thing. In this case, I looked up The Complete Idiot's Guide to Sewing. What I like about NetLibrary is that you feel like you are really seeing the actual book, pictures and all. This is important since sometimes articles and such that you find online don't include the pictures. Sometimes that doesn't matter, but in the case of how-to books it really can make a difference. I really enjoy the fact that you can search by chapter and by page, or you can just flip through the book one page at a time. So far I haven't ever had it happen that someone else was using a book I wanted to use. Don't know if it's just because that doesn't happen often or if I just pick unpopular subjects! Either way, it is nice to just be able to look through a book quickly to find a small piece of information you need. Several times as I've been learning to sew I've used this site for the how-to books, when I come across a term in a pattern that makes no sense to me (pattern instructions assume lots of previous knowledge that I just didn't have!)
Next I went to look up books on the Constitution. This was a little tougher. When I just typed in the word "constitution" I got 5,782 results, many of which didn't seem to have much to do with the Constitution. I searched "United States Constitution" and that narrowed it down to 2,734 results, which seemed much more relevant. When I went to the advanced search button and looked up "United States Constitution" in the subject line, my results were even more relevant. I found several books right away that looked good:
Almost a Miracle: the American Victory in the War of Independence
Law in the U.S.
The American Republic: Constitution, Tendencies and Destiny
For the third portion, I went to the advanced search and typed in "Oklahoma" in the publisher field. Many of these looked like they would do nicely for the topic of Western history. Obviously not all of them would work, as not every book published in Oklahoma would be about history, but narrowing it down to the correct region to begin with seemed like a good start. Of the first page of 15 results, there were 7 books that I thought would definitely be worth a look on the topic of Western history. (it found 81 books total.) Another thing that I like about NetLibrary: the results can be sorted by newest, oldest, rank, title and author, and the site also lists related searches on the side so you can get ideas for different searches if you need more results.