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Can’t Confirm That Quotation? Search Google Books

March 7, 2012 | 5:00 AM | By

Flickr: dstrelau

Dear Savvy Searcher,

“We have hit a stumper. A colleague is looking for confirmation that Maya Angelou said the following (along with where and when):

‘We all should know that diversity makes for a rich tapestry, and we must understand that all the threads of the tapestry are equal in value no matter what their color.’

We have looked widely and been unable to confirm the attribution. Everyone on the web seems to agree that she said it but no one attributes it with a citation of any sort.

Thanks! I hope y’all can help. We are stymied.”

Joy Millam
Teacher Librarian
(Reprinted with author permission from the LM_Net Archive, answer posted here)

Dear Joy,

Google Books can help with this. What’s needed is the information that appears in a citation: the author, place, and date of publication. Luckily, traditional print materials (in the form of books) often include the kind of citation information you might need and Google Books allow you to search the full text of books.

Here’s what to do:

  1. Go to books.google.com
  2. Search for: Maya Angelou “We all should know that diversity makes for a rich tapestry, and we must understand that all the threads of the tapestry are equal in value no matter what their color”. (Generally, I advise against typing in a whole quote. As we will see shortly, I would have done better to use fewer words, as suggested in the recent post on picking good search terms.)
  3. Notice that many books simply print the quote and credit Angelou, but a few, such as Jay Phelan’s What Is Life?: A Guide to Biology w/Prep-U and Myron W. Lustig and Jolene Koester’s Intercultural Competence, agree on a source: Wouldn’t Take Nothing for My Journey Now (New York: Random House Inc., 1993) 124.
  4. Within Google Books, search for Wouldn’t Take Nothing “diversity makes for a rich tapestry.”

This is where the search gets tricky. Why did the book itself not come up in the original Google Books results? From experience, I know that famous quotes and other texts tend to change as Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Learning Methods, Google, google books

Weekly News Roundup

March 25, 2011 | 11:11 AM | By

Flickr: WilliaC

  • A federal judge threw out a proposed settlement between publishers, authors, and Google Books this week, throwing into question the future of Google’s massive efforts to digitize the world’s literature and make it available for search. The proposed settlement went “too far,” according to the judge, giving Google too much control over “orphan works,” those books whose copyrights aren’t known. The Chronicle of Higher Education’s Jen Howard has a good write-up of this long legal saga.
  • Inkling, the makers of a textbook app for iPad, has raised a round of funding that includes a minority investment from the two largest publishers of educational content in the world: Pearson and McGraw-Hill. Inkling’s app re-envisions how textbook content should appear on tablets, making them far more rich and interactive than simply converting the text to a digital format.
  • Chegg, the largest textbook rental company in the world, announced this week that it was expanding its offerings to include course selection and homework help information. The additions stem from two acquisitions the company made last year — CourseRank and Cramster — and it’s an effort, according to Chegg, to make its services more personalized.
  • One of the largest publishers of children’s books in the world, Scholastic, reported a worse-than-expected quarterly loss this week. Despite an influx of federal education technology funds, profits were down for the company, in part because of budget pressures for schools and families.
  • California Connects, a federally funded program aimed at increasing digital literacy and broadband access among under-served communities launched this week, as part of a multi-year effort to address California’s digital divide.
  • The FCC and Department of Education unveiled a special version of the National Broadband Map that reveals the availability and speed of broadband at U.S. schools. According to the data, about two-thirds of schools surveyed have broadband speeds less than 25 Mbps. Most schools need a connection speed of about 100 Mbps for every 1000 students.
FILED UNDER: broadband, california connects, chegg, digital-divide, google books, inkling, scholastic, weekly news roundup