- Google Books -

Speaking of Google Books: I actually love the service, even if for many books not all of the pages are available. It was a definite boon when I was tracking down quotations for my latest project. I could just type in a representative portion of the quotation, and, voilà, in about 80% of the cases, the quotation would pop up. No need to run to the library; no need to run to my study!

Yes, of course, I should have kept notes as to where the quotations came from in the first place. But the nature of the project was such that at first it was not going to use citation by page number. Only later was it decided that we would in fact use regular citations, and that meant tracking down page numbers for something like 300 notes. I think Google Books cut the amount of time by at least a factor of 10.