The old Reader's Guide to Periodical Literature

I know that today's equivalent is Google, but I feel like it's missing something. Back in the 80's, when I was in 6th grade, we learned how to use the Reader's Guide to Periodical Literature. After an hour or so of instruction, I felt pretty confident that I could find all the interviews that a certain author gave, or articles about that author in magazines that mattered. Or at least, I could find a worthwhile list. So I'm looking for articles about, or interviews with some Authors, like Ken Follett, Herman Wouk, etc. I google their names. These authors have been published and successful for decades. I'm sure there must be interviews with each of them in some major magazines during that time. But I'm not seeing them in a google search.

Can anyone tell me where you would look for something like this?

Cedar Bristol

periodicals

Comments

Cedar Bristol: I just found the site of the actual reader's guide. You have to pay, so I guess the answer is to find out if Seattle Public Library subscribes to this. The question seems a bit silly now that writing it out seems to have brought me to the answer.
jonsca: Well, it's okay to ask and answer your own question, so if you elaborate a bit on why that's the answer, be my guest.

Answer by Mary Jo Finch

You should try Google Scholar for scholarly articles and Google Books for books. They are fairly comprehensive, importing citations from a wide range of databases and libraries. In Google Scholar, the records will typically tell you not only the citation but what database you will find it in, which makes tracking down the article a little easier.

In Google Scholar, for example, if I search for Herman Wouk I get pages and pages of citations, including all of his books. If I use the advanced search (hit the down triangle at the end of the search box) and ask for Herman Wouk in the title, I get 3 pages of citations - a mix of literary criticism, biography, and book reviews.

Some libraries are now using Ebsco Direct (the library where I work is transitioning to it now). You can usually tell by the search box which allows you to search not only the inhouse materials (traditional catalog) but all of the online resources as well. Ebsco purchased indexing rights to about 85% of the databases out there, so if your library has this capability, you can search from the library's website and all of the articles and books they have access to will be returned in the search - so Reader's Guide but only for actually available materials. It's way better than the clunky federated searching of the past, search result relativity is higher because they are indexed records (not just kewowrd), and you know you can read what you find!