Building a Searchable Psychoed Library

Do you have a few psychoed text books laying around? I bet they are full of extremely useful information. If you only had the time to search through them all. Unfortunately this can be a pretty big hassle if you've build a collection of any size. Recently I discovered a nice little option over at Google's book search that could make indexes a thing of the past.

Google Book Search is an index and archiving project that you may have heard about in the news about a year ago. Google was attempting to scan in the contents of every book written in order to allow people to find resources and texts of interest. Unfortunately the press grabbed onto the story and tweaked it just enough to terrify book publishers into thinking Google was giving books away for free. This is certainly not the case as the service allows you only to see a brief portion of a page (enough to gain your interest and encourage you to pick up the book if it has the information you need). I've used this search tool in the past to find books on certain topics that are worth ordering for reference use. What I recently noticed is that if you have a Google account (if you don't sign up for one by clicking here) you can use the database to build a search program for your own library.

All you have to do is enter the title of each of your books in the search box, find the copy that is yours, and click on "add to library". After this you can then search your own personal library for important references.

Unfortunately every book you own has likely not been scanned (some publishers were ignorant of the purpose of the project and refused permission) but it is a good start to finding resources.

For example.. lets say I was looking for a reference on story recall and ADHD. I go to "My Library" on Google Book Search and add "story recall" ADHD as a search term and poof it tells me the pages of interest in my copy of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder by Barkley.

That should save you some time... next I'll show you how to build a searchable article database and why you should always buy eBooks!