EVALUATING YOUR BOOKS

I am duplicating a response from one of the discussion posting regarding the evaluation of your books. In order to evaluate the books, are you actually REQUIRED to examine the physical book in the library OR can you just take a look at the information provided online from the book records themselves and from sources like Amazon.com.

This is an excellent question. Of course it is always the best course of action when evaluating a resource (this includes periodicals as well as books), to look at the actual physical item - often more information is obtained from actually looking at the printed resource. This is sometimes a problem for students taking an online course as they do not have ready access to the printed item that they ideally may like to look at; however, in any research process, it is not always necessary especially in the case of books to actually have the item in hand. The idea is to DETERMINE IF an item WOULD work in support of a thesis. Enough information is often provided from the book record itself (contents notes, table of contents, subject headings,etc) as well as from reviews taken either from the catalog from a source such as Amazon.com to determine what the book is about and whether or not you can use it for your own research. So to answer your question, no it is not required if enough information is provided from online sources.