Booklist Online: Book Reviews from the American Library Association

Atlas, the database of the collection of the Louvre is now in English as well as French.  The collection of 35,000 works of art may be searched by keyword, artist, title, technique, medium, department and even room.  For each work there is a high-resolution image, a description and the location of the work in the Louvre.  A [...]

Last year, when I was working on the 2008 Reference Books Bulletin Encyclopedia Update, I noticed that World Book Encyclopedia came with a Mixed Sources label from the Forest Stewardship Council, meaning “wood comes from FSC certified well managed forests, company controlled sources and/or recycled material.” Ever since then I’ve been looking for evidence of [...]

At the “Rethinking the Reference Collection” program presented by Reference Books Bulletin at the recent ALA Annual Conference, several panelists and audience members mentioned what seems to be accelerating trend: moving reference books into the circulating stacks.  As panelist Dave Tyckson noted, reference collections were first established in anticipation of high use, but “now that the use [...]

There was an interesting article in The New York Times last week about the problems associated with photographs of the famous and infamous on Wikipedia.  It reminded me that when Reference Books Bulletin reviewed numerous sets of encyclopedias the reviewer always commented on the photographs and illustrations.  But now when using Wikipedia rather than a conventional encyclopedia, I never [...]

What was the first reference source?  I mean before dictionaries and encyclopedias, before books and libraries, before the spoken or written word, perhaps even before the dawn of humankind?
I would like to suggest, in all seriousness, light itself.  Of course, light is much more than a reference source; it is a natural phenomenon, an essential [...]

The 2009 SIIA (Software and Information Industry Association) awards have just been announced. Why should we care? Well, we are part of the information industry, and amidst the winners of awards for Best Supply Chain Solution and Best Vertical Business Market Content Solution, there are some names that will be familiar to reference librarians.
For 2009, [...]

It seems nearly all database providers are offering free widgets these days.  Widgets are search boxes embedded in a website, email, course management system, or other online source to provide easy searching and access to information.  Britannica, Ebsco, Gale, Infobase, Credo Reference, and a host of others offer widgets.  Sara Kelly Johns, one of the [...]

There’s so much going on in reference publishing (on the electronic side, I mean) that it’s hard to keep up. A spare hour or so rushing through the great bazaar that is the ALA Annual Conference exhibits barely scratches the surface. Here are are few things I saw. There are many others I missed.
At the Oxford [...]

Reference Books Bulletin’s annual Fall Reference Preview comes out soon in the August issue of Booklist.  A quick survey of past Fall Reference Preview is a good indication of how reference publishing has changed over the years. We took a look back at the first FRP, published in 1998, and saw many familiar names that have [...]

The first time I taught the required introductory course on reference and information services I only briefly mentioned library instruction and information literacy.  In hindsight, this felt this was a serious oversight as instruction had always been a large and important of my work as a reference librarian.  Now I’ve added an assignment and class [...]

The catalogue raisonné is a wonderful and specialized category of art reference source whose ideals include completeness and authority, but which invariably falls short of at least the former ideal.  Publication brings to light a statement of what is known by an expert or team of experts about an artist’s works; at the same time, it is an invitation (reluctant, [...]

govfresh.com is a commerical web site that was launched on May Day 2009. It aggregates all US Government news feeds through various social media outlets including Flickr, Twitter and YouTube.  The feeds include news from the White House and US departments, agencies and the military.  Congress and the Supreme Court are not official feeds since they come through Twitter and RSS [...]

A classic reference title is now available online.  Gale/Cengage announced at ALA that the 17 volume Grzimek’s Animal Life Encyclopedia has been transformed to an interactive, media-rich online product (yes, this means subscription).  Touted as a knowledge portal, Grzimek’s will feature over 4000 species.  The online product will include audio tracks, maps, photos, videos, interactive [...]

During our panel discussion “Rethinking the Reference Collection” at ALA, the question came up - how do you measure the use of your reference collection?  Each of the panelists enthusiastically suggested a local “checkout” of the reference items before they are reshelved.  I must say that I do the same thing at my institution.  Several [...]

As a print lover, it can be a little disheartening to work my way around the exhibits at an ALA conference, talking to reference publishers. As one of them told me, “No one wants to talk about books any more.”  
So,  what were people talking about at the just-concluded  Annual Conference?  The shift to e-books continues, [...]

We may not see many more print dictionaries, but online dictionaries are proliferating.  The latest is Wordnik, a kind of social dictionary which “wants to be a place for all the words, and everything known about them.”  Wordnik CEO and co-founder Erin McKean, former editor-in-chief for American Dictionaries at Oxford Unviersity Press, was interviewed yesterday on [...]

At the Reference Books Bulletin “Rethinking the Reference Collection” program at the ALA Annual Conference yesterday, one of the panelists, David Tyckoson, talked about the two best things that  have  happened in reference in the past  few years: Serials Solutions and OpenURL.  Why?  They have no content, but they make our lives easier by improving findability.  [...]

This morning in the McCormick Center RBB hosted a lively and informative program, “Rethinking the Reference Collection,” in a packed room in the new West wing of the convention center.  Dave Tyckoson, head of reference services from Fresno State spoke from the academic libraries viewpoint; Barbara Bibel, reference librarian from Oakland Public Library spoke from [...]

This afternoon I attended EBSCO’s luncheon for academic librarians.  This post will be a quick overview of the new projects and upgrades, I will post more detailed information after the conference when I get a chance to read over all the handouts.
Over the fall and winter, EBSCO will be premiering 3 new databases.  An all [...]

Although I will not be at ALA this weekend you may be sure I will be thinking about past conferences.  It is said that when attendees evaluate a conference, they talk about their trip, what the hotel was like and of course, the food!  After all that they may mention a meeting or program that was “fairly [...]