Robert I. Berkman

I'm a Systems Librarian, but for a 6-month period in 2015 I temporarily managed the research team in my library. It was around the end of this period that this new edition of Find It Fast came across my desk and I can assure you that the resources listed in this book -- many of with which I wasn't familiar before managing the research team -- are valuable, reliable, and indispensable.

I was a little apprehensive after reading acknowledgements at the front of the book and discovering that the previous edition was released in the year 2000, well before many new online research tools and platforms became available. I worried, for instance, that the author would have a bias towards print and dismiss research in social media. Or that he would take the opposite tack and obsess over online tools at the expense of print resources, which can sometimes provide information that you just won't find elsewhere.

I'm to say that the author remains agnostic about sources of information and defends the importance of libraries just as much as he defends the importance of Twitter. Where you get the information isn't as important as uncovering it, making sure it is authoritative, and taking into consideration any biases of the source -- all topics which are covered very well in this book.

If I have one complaint it is that the URLs for the sources mentioned are only listed at the end of the chapter in which they're mentioned, and not alongside their description in the text. Many times, this has actually proven useful because I just want to scan through the list of URLs to find what I'm looking for. At other times, however, I found myself reading source descriptions and having to constantly having to flip to the end of the chapter to get the URL to go have a look for myself.

If you do research, particularly if you're new to research as I was, I would definitely recommend this book.… (more)