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

ebrary®, a leading provider of digital content products and technologies, today announced that its flagship subscription e-book database, Academic Complete, now exceeds 50,000 titles from the world’s leading publishers.  Academic Complete continues to be the largest multidisciplinary e-book database licensed to libraries throughout the world, under a simultaneous, multi-user access model with continual growth.  Furthermore, [...]

Reference Books Bulletin’s  team of encyclopedia reviewers, Barbara Bibel and Shauna Yusko  and I, just wrapped up the 2010 Encyclopedia Update, which will appear in September 15 issue of Booklist. The Encyclopedia Update is almost 30 years old and the updates that have appeared over the years shine a light on how encyclopedia and reference publishing have changed. [...]

The September issue of Wired has an interesting cover story called The Web is Dead. Long Live the Internet. According to the authors, we are now living in a post-HTML, apps-dominated environment, and they describe this as “one of the most important shifts in the digital world” over the past few years. A number of reference [...]

Each year at the ALA Annual Conference, Booklist’s Reference Books Bulletin sponsors a program to discuss various topics related to reference and reference publishing.  This year RBB’s session focused on the process of creating a reference work, from idea to reality.  The speakers included Casper Grathwohl from Oxford University Press, Rolf Janke from SAGE Reference, [...]

OverDrive has signed a preliminary agreement with Disney Digital Books (www.disneydigitalbooks.com) that will enable libraries to offer access to Disney’s comprehensive library of books online. Young library patrons and their parents will be able to enjoy-for the first time-unlimited access to over 600 new and classic Disney books for kids of all ages with just [...]

Reprinted in full from No Shelf Required blog. Each Friday before the ALA Conference, the Independent Reference Publishers Group (IRPG) gets together to have a program and discussion of issues surrounding reference publishing.  The ALA Annual meeting was no exception.  A large group of publishers and librarians gathered to figure out, “how did we get [...]

During Booklist‘s ”Power to the User: Interactive Online Reference Sources”  webinar held on June 1, Michael Ross of Encyclopaedia Britannica talked about ways in which users can, in some cases, contribute to the content of Britannica (a development that Barbara Bibel reported on in our 2008 Encyclopedia Update.) A webinar attendee asked whether opening up the site to [...]

Gale/Cengage and ABC-CLIO announced this week that 250 ABC-CLIO titles are available in the GVRL interface.  The 250 titles cover history, humanities and general interest topics and include the Greenwood, Praeger, and Libraries Unlimited imprints as well.  For more information please visit Gale’s Re:Sources blog.

OCLC announced yesterday the sale of NetLibrary to EBSCO.  According to the press release, EBSCO will acquire the eBooks and eAudiobook collections from NetLibrary.  The content will remain available on the NetLibrary platform, but EBSCO also plans to offer it on the popular EBSCOHost platform.  Several FirstSearch databases were also licensed to EBSCO in the [...]

With the rising availability of ebooks, and potentially etextbooks, how do we as libraries help our patrons to access these books?  The rising costs of textbooks makes education less accessible than before to students.  Yet, having textbooks on reserve causes problems – staffing, processing, replacing, checking for damage or missing pages.  eTextbooks would be a [...]

Ths week, EBSCO Publishing and Alexander Street Press both announced that they are going mobile for patrons of subscribing libraries EBSCO has released EBSCOhost Mobile, allowing people to search EBSCOhost databases using smartphones and other handheld devices. Features include search modes, full text limiting, and date ranges,  plus limiting by peer-reviewed content or publication. Scrollable results lists have citations, Image [...]

According to a survey conducted by the Pew Internet Project in 2007,  “62% of adult Americans have either accessed the internet with a wireless connection away from home or work or used a non-voice data application using their cell phone or PDA.”  Non-voice data applications include not only texting, e-mailing, taking a picture, and recording a video, but also [...]

A lot of ink has been spilled recently over the growing power of Google. The current New Yorker has an article discussing the question of whether Google is getting too big.  Last week a New York Times article on the Google Books settlement referred to Google as “the 800-pound  gorilla of digital information”; today, there’s an op- [...]

Another Reference merger!  And, good news that the World Almanac will move online eventually. Infobase Publishing Acquires Iconic World Almanac Brand New York, NY (September 1, 2009)–Infobase Publishing announced today that it has acquired the World Almanac imprint from Weekly Reader Publishing Group. Terms of the transaction were not disclosed.

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 [...]

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 [...]