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Reference books don’t generally have much personality, but here’s an exception: Darwin’s Universe: Evolution from A to Z, which the author, Richard Milner, describes as the “evolved descendent” of his earlier Encyclopedia of Evolution: Humanity’s Search for Its Origins.  The volume combines scholarship with humor to explore Darwin and his pathbreaking insights. In the foreword, [...]

Being inundated with information about the life of Edward Kennedy over the last two days got me thinking about biographical sources.  What role does print still play in biographical information?  Is there even a place for it? Every time I teach reference I include a couple of biographical questions; one about a living person, one [...]

The Federal Citizen Information Center provides a number of useful publications including 66 Ways to Save Money.  It is a subject list of simple, common sense suggestions. Examples are #11 – “Don’t decide to lease a car just because the payments are lower than on a traditional auto loan.   The leasing payments are lower because you [...]

After many years of 10 to 15% cuts in our materials budget, we got really bad news: this year the cut is 25% of what’s left! Given the financial woes of the city of Oakland and the State of California, it is not a total surprise, but why do the Powers that Be always hit [...]

I spent Monday with several librarians in a discussion on the future eReference platform.  I’m referring to products like Credo Reference, GVRL, Sage Reference Online, Oxford Scholarship Online, etc.  Our discussion revolved around platform features, good features and not so good features.  I’m going to list some highlights of the discussion below, but would really [...]

There are currently 890 UNESCO World Heritage sites.  The list of sites, alphabetically arranged by country, can be found with extensive supporting information (in most cases descriptions, documents, maps, image gallery, etc.).  From the website, sites on the Official World Heritage List can be located in Google Earth.  In addition to the 890 sites themselves, features [...]

I have a love-hate relationship with Wikipedia. The hate part has to do with the unstable “everyone is an editor” aspect of  information on the site, so I was interested to see an article in today’s New York Times about how Wikipedia will soon begin to impose more control over articles about living people.  Once the new [...]

My favorite among the titles we’ve reviewed for the September 1 issue of Reference Books Bulletin is the third edition of Paul Dickson’s Dickson Baseball Dictionary. The baseball reference shelf is already pretty full, what with all those statistical compilations. But make room for Dickson, which is baseball’s answer to the  Oxford English Dictionary, containing an impressive 10,000 entries and 18,000 definitions [...]

Hearing Nancy Pearl on Morning Edition earlier today, “Mysteries you might have missed along the way,” reminded me that some reference books can be fun for browsing and inspiration.  Nancy Pearl’s Booklust and More Booklust for adult readers, and Book Crush for teens are some of my favorite fun reference books.  These are the kinds [...]

Check out this video from some clever folks in Norway. It seems especially apt when so many of us are having a hard time letting go of print.

The one print reference source I would find it hardest to do without is the small spiral-bound, college-ruled notebook I carry almost everywhere–to work, to museums, to lectures, and a few days ago to Port Isabel on South Padre Island, not far from Mexico.  One cryptic notation I made on the drive home (my wife drove) [...]

Libraries made the headlines in last night’s local newscast. It seems that the San Jose Public Library, in the heart of Silicon Valley, is now taking reference questions via text messaging. We already interact with our patrons in person, by phone, by e-mail, and in online chat reference, so texting is the logical next step. [...]

Recently I was doing research on the chef Thomas Keller and also wanted to know what farro and broccolini are.  Unknowingly I compared traditional reference sources to Wikipedia.  I began the search for Keller using Academic Search Complete and Lexis Nexis Academic.  Through these two subscription databases, I found reviews of his books and restaurants and an interview with Keller [...]

I’ve finally gotten my hands on a copy of the new edition of Conducting the Reference Interview that I mentioned previously was due out this summer, and it’s even better that I  hoped. The full and formal review will be in Booklist later this fall, but in the meantime, I’m too excited about this to [...]

What do vampires and Virginia Woolf  have in common?  No, they’re not part of the new fiction trend that Neil Hollands talks about over at Book Group Buzz (at least not yet). Instead, they both occupy space in Encyclopedia of Time: Science, Philosophy, Theology, & Culture, edited by H. James Birx and published by Sage. Every so often [...]

Back in the day, at least 2/3 of my reference collection budget supported standing orders for hundreds of print statistical books, biographical sources, directories, dictionaries,and almanacs of all types.  Each year it seems to dwindle as we ask ourselves, do we really need to get that print source EVERY year?  This year is no different, [...]

Having learned from two of my librarian friends that they had read (unprompted by me) and approved of my July 19, 2009, Points of Reference post “The Catalogue Raisonné,”  I have been inspired to continue the theme. I announced my plan at the end of that post to return to the Houston Public Library’s central [...]

Booklist hosted the Independent Reference Publishers’ Group meeting that took place at the ALA Annual Conference in Chicago last month. IPRG gets together at every ALA conference to discuss and hear about matters related to reference publishing. I invited some librarians from the school and public libraries to come to the meeting and talk about what’s [...]

I’m putting the finishing touches on Reference Books Bulletin’s annual Encyclopedia Update, which is published in the September 15 issue of  Booklist. In it , we review the (ever-dwindling) print and online general encyclopedias like Encyclopaedia Britannica and World Book. Over the years, RBB’s eagle-eyed encyclopedia reviewers have taken publishers to task for not keeping their print [...]

This will be the first in a series of posts about some of the many web based reference tools for readers’ advisory work. Today’s sites are commercial sites that are also useful for RA. Amazon.com (www.amazon.com): One of the most beneficial commercial sites available to advisors, internet leviathan Amazon is an excellent source for bibliographic [...]