Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) is offered by a consortium of 12 major US and UK botanical and natural history libraries with a collection of 46,000-plus titles and 90,000-plus volumes. The biodiversity-related items range in date from 1450 to the present. The collection is patron driven; patrons may request items to be scanned into the digital library. This feature is particularly helpful for scholars who cannot physically travel to view rare documents. The scans are high quality, but some images are slightly crooked or off-center. However, this does not significantly affect the documents’ readability. The download options are extremely helpful: individual pages, PDF, OCR, images, bibliographic information, or all options.

Users may browse by Titles, Authors, Subjects, Map, and Year, and limit by language and contributing institution. Searching can be slightly puzzling to the untrained eye. A simple keyword search returns just a few of the possible results, and one must click through the results to get to the content. This is not a problem for experienced searchers, but undergraduates may have some difficulty deciphering the first results. A variety of search options enhance browsing of the thousands of freely available documents. One such feature permits the creation of a full bibliography with links to the full text. One may easily link to an entire bibliography using a specific URL, with the addition of a genus and species or family name. This option streamlines the search process, allowing researchers to easily determine the usefulness of BHL to their own research. The site has a rich infrastructure encompassing wikis, blog content, developer tools, tutorials, and more. This growing online library for the modern scholar would be an especially compelling addition to a library’s discovery service. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Lower- and upper-level undergraduates; graduate students. — J. Clemons, College of Wooster

The award-winning 5-volume Oxford History of Western Music is now available in interactive form online, offering an eminently readable account of the evolution of Western classical music by one of the most prominent and provocative musicologists of our time, Richard Taruskin. This online version also provides links into Grove Music Online.

The three-volume APA Handbook of Research Methods in Psychology includes descriptions of many techniques that psychologists and others have developed to help them pursue a shared understanding of why humans think, feel, and behave the way they do. Researchers use the Handbook for guidance choosing a method, researchers make decisions about what data or measurement techniques will best capture the thoughts, feelings, and behaviors that interest them; what research design best fits the question that they want to answer; and what strategies for data analysis best match the characteristics of their design and measurements. The earliest chapters in the handbook address the broadest questions related to research designs. Later handbook chapters describe the types of data that psychologists most often collect and how to determine whether the measurement techniques are the best ones for the research purpose. Issues and choices to be considered when writing up research to share with the community of psychologists are discussed in the handbook’s concluding chapters.