Booklist Online: More than 130,000 book reviews for librarians, book groups, and book lovers - from the trusted experts at the American Library Association

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 published in the journal Restaurants and Institutions.  Using my own reference culinary collection I looked up farro and broccolini but found nothing.  Neither was listed in the six or seven sources I checked, including  The New Food Lover’s Companion (2nd edition, 1995).  From there I went to Wikipedia.  I found a great entry for Keller with references, footnotes and a candid photo (see The Photographs in Wikipedia ).   An external link had a thirty minute comprehensive video interview with Charlie Rose. I also found the definitions for broccolini and farro in Wikipedia.  Broccolini was introduced in the US in 1998 and is grown in Arizona and California.  The entry also had its scientific classification and an ok colored photo.  The farro definition was complete and concise and linked to a desk-study published by the Global Facilitation Unit for Underutilized Species.  With this research Wikipedia definitely won, but I’m not yet ready to stop using traditional reference resources.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 18th, 2009 at 9:03 am and is filed under At the Reference Desk, Databases, Print Resources, Web Resources. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.