How to Use the Book Review Digest

The Book Review Digest is published several times per year, and a cumulative volume for the whole year. Book Review Digest began in 1905, and the library has the annual volumes from 1905 to the present. There are cumulative indexes to Book Review Digest. One four volume set covers 1905-1974, and another one volume set covers 1975-1984, and a third volume covers 1985-1994. After 1994 there is no cumulative index, so you will have to search the volumes year by year if you don't know when the book was published.

Step 1: Go to one of the cumulative indexes, called the Author-Title Index.

The books that are reviewed are organized in the Book Review Digest. If you know the year that the book was published that you are trying to find reviews of, you could find the year on the bookshelf and never use the cumulative index. But it is often better to use the cumulative index because:

Use of the Cumulative Indexes:

In the Author-Title Index you look up your author's name. After the author's name will be a list of all the books the author wrote that are included in Book Review Digest. Following each title will be the year the review can be found.

As mentioned above, there are the following Author-Title Indexes

                                        1905-1974 Author-Title Index  (four volumes)
                                        1975-1984 Author-Title Index (one volume)
                                        1985-1994 Author-Title Index (one volume)
 
 

EXAMPLE: to look up what volume to look for reviews of A Stillness at Appomattox by Bruce Catton, go to Author/Title Index. The example below is what you will find:

The reviews are arranged in each annual volume by the author. In the example above, the book by Bruce Catton called A Stillness at Appomattox, is in the 1953 volume. Going to that volume, you would look up Catton, Bruce.

What will follow the author's name is the title of the book, then quotations from reviews, and then a citation to the magazine or journal that each review can be found.
 

Here is an example of what a book review entry looks like:

There are other citations also to where a review of A Stillness at Appomattox can be found listed under Bruce Catton's name in the 1953 Volume:
 

Each one of these citations listed above contains the title of the magazine, the issue date, and the page number. The page number can be listed in two ways:
 
 
 

(1) page number can be listed like this: p3

(2) page number can be listed after the volume of the magazine or journal like this:

You will need to look in the Periodical Holdings List for your journal name.  The Periodicals Holdings List contains all the journals and magazines that the Southeastern Oklahoma State University Library subscribes to, or has any holdings of. For each journal and magazine listed, it will tell you the following:

                                    1. years that we have of a journal or magazine
                                    2. where that journal or magazine is located in the library

Example:

In Step 3 the example of a book review was found in Library J, which stands for Library Journal. Looking in the holdings list we find that the library has library journal in the basement from 1916 to 1984 (with some gaps) shelved in the basement, and from 1985 to the present in microfiche.

Now you would look for the Nov 15, 1953 issue in part two of volume 53 of Library Journal and look on page 2026. There will be the complete review, as is shown below.
 
 

Remember also that in Book Review Digest, there are only citations to where book reviews can be found in magazines and journals, not the book reviews themselves