Tuesday, October 25, 2011

Research Resource

My research on Bolivian water politics and privatization started out fairly slow. While there is plenty of information on the water riots that took place in Cochabamba, Bolivia in 2000, finding critiques and further information on the situation concerning the water system as it is today, 11 years later is proving to be less fruitful.

However, I have discovered a resource through the St. John’s library that has been helpful in accessing books that are not available in either the St. John’s library or the New York public libraries. While I assume most people are familiar with the website WorldCat, an extremely useful and thorough catalog of library collections searchable by zip code, most of the books I have searched for have not been found in public libraries or the St. John’s libraries. However, the online library resource, ebrary, has had many of the books available as ebooks and it turns out that St. John’s has a trial account with ebrary. If you access ebrary through the library’s database on St. John’s central, similar to how one can access Ebscohost or Proquest, you can search and read many books that are not available at the St. John’s library or in the nearest public library.

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