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

Quotation books occupy a special niche in the reference collection. Web sites like Quoteland and  Quoteworld notwithstanding, every library needs at least one quotation book on its ready-reference shelf. In the just-published January 1 and 15, 2011 issue of Booklist, we review two. One is the revised edition of Elaine Partnow's The Quotable Woman: The First 5,000 Years. The other is [...]

Everyday we hear about pollution in the air, water, and soil. Foods and drugs get recalled due to contiaminants. Understanding basic toxicology will help one to how these dangerous substances work and how they affect the body. The National Library of Medicine (NLM) and the U.S. Society of Toxicology have created ToxLearn http://toxlearn.nlm.nih.gov/ as an intorduction to [...]

The 2011 winner of the Dartmouth Medal, awarded by the RUSA division of ALA to a reference work "of outstanding quality and significance," will be announced at the upcoming  ALA Midwinter meeting. Though not as glamorous as other awards, such as the Newbery and the Caldecott, it's a big deal in the reference world. In [...]

A few months ago I wrote here about Rosetta Stone's Endangered Language Program, which helps indigenous communities preserve their languages. The Cherokee Nation, concerned that there are so few speakers of the Cherokee language left, has worked with Apple to create an iPhone app to encourage young people to use the language more. See this article [...]

Here's a new twist on making primary source material available to a wider audience. In the past 25 years, the Bentham Project has transcribed 20,000 folios of manuscripts written by Jeremy Bentham and held by University College London Library. But there are still 40,000 folios to go. In preparation for a new edition of Bentham's works, the Bentham Project [...]

As I spend Christmas in Florida enjoying the weather which is cool for Floridians, I remember spending holidays in Vermont skiing.  Now there are numerous apps for downhill skiing.  iTrailMap. is a basic,  free app which includes maps of over 750 ski resorts worldwide.   The maps can be downloaded for use on iPad, iPhone or [...]

I've been thinking a lot about food this week, partly because I've been eating too much of it, and partly because I recently watched a documentary on PBS called "Fannie's Last Supper," about the re-creation of a 12-course Christmas dinner hosted by Fannie Farmer in 1896. I went online to look for some sites related to culinary history, [...]

Coming soon from EBSCO, the expansion of multilanguage searching in EBSCO Discovery Service (EDS) and EBSCOhost® to include over forty-five (45) languages.  This includes the searching, discovery and display of database and catalog content in these languages.   Additionally, the EBSCOhost interface will be localized into 25 languages, with more planned.  For more information on [...]

Food tends to be a big part of holiday celebrations, so this week I'm taking a look back at some of the big food-related reference titles that have been reviewed in RBB in the past few years. One notable example is Encyclopedia of Food and Culture, published by Scribner back in 2002. This set covers [...]

Everyone likes to look at videos. Finding the good ones can be difficult. Choice just published a list of free streaming media resources in its January 2011 ShelfLife Newsletter. It covers a wide range of subjects ranging from MedlinePlus anatomy videos to Stanford's Entrepreneurship Corner, to Europa Film Treasures. There are also videos covering the [...]

When I saw Venus today, which is now the very bright morning star, it reminded me of the web site EarthSky.org.   Earth Sky has been in existence for almost twenty years with the goal of being "a clear voice for science." In addition to the web site it has daily audio and video segments which [...]

All are invited to attend this discussion forum sponsored by RUSA's Reference Publishing Advisory Committee at the ALA MidWinter Conference in San Diego, January 9th.  Hope to see you there! Discovery and Access of electronic reference works--discussion forum RUSA's Reference Publishing Advisory Committee will be hosting a discussion forum on e-reference discovery. Open to all [...]

Onomastics--the study of names--is a fascinating category of reference. One of the titles reviewed in the December 15 issue of RBB is the fifth edition of Dictionary of Pseudonyms: 13,000 Assumed Names and Their Origins by Adrian Room. Room, who is described as a "world-famous expert on onomastics," is also the man behind Placenames of the [...]

Everyone hears about the mass slaughter of Jews, Roma (gypsies) and others deemed undesirable by the Nazis during World War II. There were, however, people who fought back. Bands of partisans hid in the forests of Poland and Russia. They sabotaged railroad lines and attacked armies going through the countryside.  Approximately 20,000-30,000 of these brave [...]

It's the time of year for lists of the year, and Yale has just released the top quotes of 2010. Number one is "I am not a witch" (Christine O'Donnell), followed by "I'd like my life back" (Tony Hayward). You can find the full list here. The list is compiled by Yale librarian and Yale [...]

This morning as I was getting ready for work I caught this story, "End of Days for Bookstores?" on NPR. It's interesting to me that there is so much in the news lately about how new digital delivery models are causing a paradigm shift for trade publishers and for the old ways of selling content, because [...]

Figment.com was developed by Dana Goodyear, a staff writer at the New Yorker and Jacob Lewis, a former managing editor of the magazine.  Its purpose is to provide a forum for young writers to have others read and comment on their writings.  The young authors may also comment on what others have written.  The sign-up is [...]

The Oxford English Dictionary Online was relaunched last week, 10 years after it first appeared. The new versi0n has over 600,000 words and now incorporates the Historical Thesaurus of the OED. The RBB review of the previous version was long (really long) on technicalities, as were most of our reviews of electronic resources back then, when the [...]

The new book Fever: How Malaria Has Ruled the World for 500,000 Years by Sonia Shah (Farrar Strauss & Giroux, 2010) points out that the lowly protozoa carried by the anopheles mosquito has yet to be conquered by humankind. Those battling this endemic disease have a new free resource from Elsevier. Malaria Nexus at http://www.malarianexus.com/ makes [...]

The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation promotes "informed and engaged communities" in many different ways.  One that is gaining national attention is Random Acts of Culture.org. As audiences are declining at classical music concerts and opera, the foundation hopes that these random acts will encourage the public to attend traditional live performances.  The [...]