Over the past few years, Langsdale Library has been providing access to a growing collection of ebooks, Even if you are someone who prefers the printed page, reference books seem particular well suited to an electronic format. For these sources, a good part of their value comes from the ability to look up a topic and get solid background information when you need it. So having online access to these resources can be a boon.
Our electronic reference sources are findable through the library catalog, but they can be difficult to discover if you don’t know what we have available. So this semester, I will take some time to tell you about some of the reference books we have available online. To begin is one of my favorite reference sources, the Proquest Statistical Abstract of the United States.
Until 2012, the Stat Abstracts were published by the U.S. Census Bureau, and media outlets like NPR would routinely do segments on some of the interesting statistics located inside its pages. Due to cuts in funding, the federal government stopped publishing the Stat Abstracts, and a company called Bernan Press stepped in to take it over. So the most recent versions are available to UB students, staff and faculty, but you must go through the library home page in order to gain access to it. The video above gives you some idea of things you can find within the Stat Abstracts, but there is a lot more. If you have the opportunity to look through the ProQuest Statistical Abstract of the United States yourself, maybe you can find your own favorite statistics.