Thanks to RageBoy’s Chief Blogging Officer gig, I’ve known about HighBeam, but it’s only as I buckle down to some serious writing — I’m working on Chapter 2 — that I’ve discovered just how great resource it is. I’ve been looking into how libraries organized books before Dewey decimalized classification and HighBeam is turning up lots of great stuff from its collection 34 million articles. I’m impressed. You can even turn your queries into RSS feeds.

Plus, they make it easy to blog an article and point to its full text. For example, suppose I want to quote this from an article I found there:

What if however, a major focus upon classification as a research goal leads not to a rigorous and robust body of knowledge in presidential studies as Glad predicts but rather to a version of the emperor’s encyclopedia described by Jorge Luis Borges…?

By clicking the “Blog this article” link, HighBeam generates the html-ized citation info:

from: Borges’s encyclopedia and classification in presidential studies. by Abbott, Philip
source: Presidential Studies Quarterly, December 1, 2004.
via: HighBeam™ Research
COPYRIGHT 2004 Center for the Study of the Presidency

I will be using HighBeam a whole heck of a lot. It’s $100/year or $20/month. (One missing feature: I’d like to have a button that will create a bibliographic citation for me, in text, html or rtf.) [Technorati tags: highbeam rageboy]

Categories: Uncategorized dw