Some book publishers are more highly-regarded than others. Here are several rankings of book publishers:

• article #1 and article #2 and article #3 and article #4 and article #5

Reviews of "scholarly" books -- those intended for the college/university market -- are usually available in periodicals weeks, months, or even years after the book's publication. Here is a guide to scholarly book reviews, which refers to sources available at W&L.

W&L libraries and most other academic libraries in the U.S. arrange most of their materials on the shelves according to the Library of Congress (LC) Classification System.

See this official outline of the LC system.

The W&L library catalog lists books (and other materials) in Leyburn Library, Telford Science Library, and the Law Library.

The preferred method for searching Annie probably would be the Keyword option, which allows you to combine terms and/or to search for various forms of a term.

You can use an asterisk (*) in Keyword searching to substitute for 1 to 5 characters, thus allowing you to expand a search.
Example: environment* will find environment, environmental, environmentally, environmentalist, etc.

Here are some sample searches:

• "civil rights" journalis*  -- combining terms (same thing as "civil rights" AND journalis*), with these results
• "civil rights" AND (journalis* OR newspaper*) -- use of near-synonyms, with these results

Doctoral dissertations are not published books, but can be considered book-length scholarly studies.
W&L subscribes to a database which offers the complete texts of over 1 million dissertations and theses.