I bought an encyclopedia

In Canada, neighborhood libraries are a tiny fraction of the size of university research libraries, so they can't possibly carry anything remotely approximating the content of a university research library.

We do have a central public library, with perhaps a million odd books, but is not a replacement for research library in any sense, and isn't intended to be one. Compare that to the library in my alma mater university which contained about 2.5 million books.

For what it's worth, for most of my life, I've had the option of visiting my local university library so that I could crawl through the shelves looking for particular journal articles, or searching through the 3 feet of shelves on other side of a relevant book that I found in the card stacks. Sadly, that's no longer the case. The vast majority of content in modern university libraries is now available only in digital form, accessible through terminals that are not usable by members of the public, which provide access to otherwise-paywalled journals. And the last time I visited my local university library, they no longer allowed members of the general public to enter. For most of the my lifetime, one of the conditions of government funding for university libraries was that they had to provide at least limited access to the general public. I'm not sure what happened.

Thankfully, there are now other ways to access research material. Pre-prints are often available, and open-access journals are increasingly prevalent. And for those that are desperate, there are, of course, various dubiously legal sources.

The International Convention on Road Signs and Signals [1] defines a motor or power-driven vehicle as a self-propelled road vehicle. Rail-borne vehicles and country-specifically mopeds which are not treated as motorcycles are exceptions. A second definition in this convention limits the term motor vehicle to those vehicles which are used for carrying persons or goods or for drawing on the road vehicles used for the carriage or persons or goods.

"Country-specifically" -> "jurisdiction-specific definitions of mopeds".

"in this convention" -> "in the convention"

"the term motor vehicle" -> "the term 'motor vehicle'"

The final sentence makes no sense to me and is certainly missing a comma.

The degree to which my children's teachers actively don't care about this is hard to overstate. I was able to trivially catch this by googling phrases from papers my daughter had "written" and when I showed it to her English teacher the response was roughly: "Yeah, it sucks that all kids are doing that these days."

Saw the same daughter doing homework by using C-f to search the textbook for keywords in the question and pasting the answer. Sometimes this yielded nonsensical answers because the keywords appeared in multiple places. She got a high A in that class (including perfect scores on the homework).

If you actually can't afford one, I wholeheartedly endorse this. But if you can afford a new set, please buy a new set. They only still print them because a minimum number of people buy them new. I can't imagine this will last forever, so, support World Book.

https://www.worldbook.com/encyclopedias.aspx

The previous years set is often discounted, if the full price is a little too much for you.