joy millam teacher librarian (reprinted with permission of author from lm_net file, answer posted here)
dear joy,
You are reading: Google books quote search
google books can help with this. what is needed is the information that appears in a citation: author, place and date of publication. Fortunately, traditional print materials (in the form of books) often include the kind of citation information you might need, and Google Books allows you to search the full text of books.
This is what you need to do:
- go to books.google.com
- search: maya angelou “we all need to know that diversity is a rich tapestry, and we need to understand that all threads in the tapestry are equal in value regardless of matter its color. (I usually advise against writing a full citation. As we’ll see shortly, it would have been better to use fewer words, as suggested in the recent post on choosing good search terms.)
- please note That many books just print the quote and credit Angelou, but some, like What Is Life?: A Guide to Biology by Jay Phelan w/Prep-U and Myron W. the intercultural competence of lustig and jolene koester, agree in one source: i wouldn’t take anything for my trip now (new york: random house inc., 1993) 124.
- within google books, search no don’t take nothing “diversity creates a rich tapestry”.
This is where the search gets tricky. why didn’t the book itself show up in the original google books results? I know from experience that famous quotes and other texts tend to change as they spread. as dan russell wrote in his search post on misquotes:
“misquotes and omitted attributions happen all the time. all the time. even people you think would get it right, eg jfk who was a prolific reciter of others and had a speech writing team to boot, he often. got the attributions wrong.”
See Also: Best Unreal Engine Books For Aspiring Game Developers
When checking a citation, you shouldn’t assume you have the saying verbatim: you never know what words someone has added or subtracted along the way. once again, the best practice is to choose the keywords that best define what you are looking for. Google ranks results, in part, based on whether search terms are close to each other and in the same order on a page. therefore, when trying to locate a specific passage, it is best to choose a phrase rather than individual words.
I look for a combination that I don’t imagine would appear any place but in the item I want to find. For example, I pick the start of the book title (Wouldn’t Take Nothing) and a unique and striking string of words from the quote (“diversity makes for a rich tapestry”). When I locate the book, click through to the profile page, and use the ‘Search in this book’ box in the left-hand column, I again enter the unique portion of the quote: 
Not only do I find the saying in question, but I discover that the version I started with, while widely quoted, included an extra word: along the way, someone had added the “what” in “no matter what their color.”
Turns out that little word stopped me. If I had simply started with Maya Angelou, Diversity Makes a Rich Tapestry, I would have found her book straight away. but because i used a quote that had words she didn’t use and put quotes around it to require a precise match, maya angelou’s book didn’t show up as a result.
Despite this misstep, from start to finish, it took less than two minutes to locate and verify the source of the quote.
The main tactic I used here is called scoping. scope is when you limit the sources you are looking for to a set of a particular type. Google Books, Google News, Google Images, and Google Scholar are examples of ways to reach within Google. Or, if you want primary sources on abraham lincoln, using a search like [site:loc.gov lincoln] to limit results to pages on the library of congress website is another type of reach.
The power of reach is one of the reasons Google Books is so efficient. I recommend google books in a wide variety of circumstances, for example:
See Also: How Many Books Were Removed from the Bible? – Faith Founded on Fact
access to historical gems:
- a student studying the massive krakatoa eruption read the 1888 royal society research report on the impact on the climate;
- students studying the early movies saw the script jazz singer original; and
- a teacher who wanted a fun lesson on believability might assign mark twain’s (burlesque) autobiography and first romance and ask students to determine if this is actually a real autobiography (an idea of the googler librarian kurt groetsch) .
develop understanding of more obscure academic topics:
- someone on google+ asked for “…examples of the medieval motif of dancers caught/trapped in a dance together.” the question even meant until i found academic sources discussing an example which then, with the help of a blog post, led to more examples, also from google books.
preview books to ensure they are a good fit for a student’s reading level before requesting them from another library:
- a student interested in rube goldberg’s comic critiques of the mechanical age was interested in reading michael north’s comedy about the machine age, but discovered in the preview that the reading level did not fit well to your needs. this prevented her from stalling on her homework for several days while she waited for the library book to arrive, and encouraged her to look for another book instead.
locate or verify books, stories and essays:
- Discover the original publication date of the print story, “Yes, Honey, Trees Can Have Purple Leaves,” by James J. backend.
- Locate the story “pat and the sarpint”, which the reader remembers is found in a book called early american folk tales.
- Proves that an article on a Jewish tradition around first menstruation, entitled “The Slap”, has been published somewhere.
- identify a reader-described book with these words: “contained Native Americans as the main characters, included witchcraft, gunrunning, and, I think, a supporting cast of hippies.”
In some of these cases, there was a sophisticated search (stay tuned for more on locating arms dealers, witches, and hippies another day). In most of these cases, however, a very simple google books search, such as typing the book title or story into the basic google books search box, discovered the expected source instantly.
bottom line: if you want to learn about something that originally appeared in print, remember to try google books.
Do you have something you read once that you would like to find again? try google books!
See Also: 50 Science Picture Books for Kids that Teach about Our Amazing World