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Going Somewhere?

Laurel Hutchinson
Reference Specialist

Travel guides are great for planning trips and for carrying along on your trip for quick reference, but, as many of you have noticed, they are far less useful the more out-of-date they get. The good news is that the library was very fortunate this year in being able to update and add to our travel section, so be sure to swing by the library before you finish planning your vacation and check our catalog to see if we carry anything pertaining to your destination.

For those “stuck-at-homers”, like me, it may seem a little strange to think of reading travel guides, but they have more uses than you might think. Sure, they are great for planning future vacations or “dream” vacations, but what about more practical uses? Every year students come to the library with school assignments on a state or country, and travel guides can be an excellent source for all kinds of information about a place – climate, a brief history, economy, population statistics, language, religion, geography, and much more.

Authors need to know everything they can about a location in order to write about it, and travel guides are great for this. Between the types of information listed above, and the wealth of other information provided by travel guides, writers can smoothly fit locations into their works and make them seem authentic and plausible.

Another great use for a travel guide is to find out more about a country or place that you hear about or read about. We hear news from Iraq and countries all over the world, but are frequently unfamiliar with them. Turning to the travel guides for a fairly succinct and reasonably up-to-date background can be of great help in giving you a point of reference (and point-of-view).

Whether you’re planning to leave for vacation the day the kids get out of school, working on a class assignment, or just curious about what beliefs caused certain groups in India to take such offense in the Richard Gere episode, the travel section here at Hickory Public Library is a great place to start.