A lot profs here tend to give annotated bibliographies as a research assignment just to get students comfortable with and practice in searching for scholarly information from a variety of sources. It's not a bad idea since most of them have never used anything but Google or other general search engine, where finding scholarly info takes a little more skill then just plugging in a few key words.
One such assignment asks them to create a bibliography of sources about a religious figure the instructor assigns. They need something like 5 books and 10 journal articles. For about two weeks now I've been working repeatedly with a student who was assigned Hillel, an early Talmudic scholar. Well, as it happens we have no books on Hillel. That's not such a big deal, though, since the students only need to cite the books, not necessarily read them and we can find books at other libraries without much difficulty. Journal articles, on the other hand, has been a real challenge. We don't have tons of database subscriptions the way research libraries have, so it was very challenging to find stuff. Of course, we also looked in Google Scholar and other free web specialty databases and search engines, but all of us were surprised to discover how little we could find. Now, of course, I do have access to SJSU's library databases, which includes JSTOR, and there I was able to find articles. But, I'm not actually allowed to share that info with the student since she can't find that using resources available to her.
The few articles we were able to find also did not lead to many other articles since they are mostly relying on primary source interpretations. But, one article we tracked down from JSTOR that was indexed by GScholar, had a citation that simply said: "R E J, XXIV, 68-81". So, first task was to find out, what is REJ. I searched around and discovered it is a French journal on Judaism. The student asked the instructor if she could use it in her bib. He said, OK, but then she wasn't sure how to cite it, since we didn't have the article in hand. So, this morning I searched for the article itself, and lo and behold, I find it in Google Books by way of the Internet Archive. Turns out it's from 1892 and the bound volumes of the the journal must have been scanned by Google. For the curious, here it is. Neither I nor the student can actually read the article since it's in French, but, hey, she's got her additional citation and I learned something new about GBooks (I didn't realize they scanned bound journal volumes).

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