Booklist Online: Book Reviews from the American Library Association

Those of you who subscribe to Credo Reference can now purchase nearly 70  SAGE Reference titles in your subscription.  The titles look great and include the very popular Ency. of Global Warming, Ency. of Disability, and the Ency. of Counseling.
In the Credo Reference press release, John Dove, Credo President said “Librarians have long called for [...]

Gale announced the release of two new 4 volume encyclopedias - Gale Contextual Encyclopedia of World Literature and Gale Contextual Encyclopedia of American Literature.  According to a Gale Press Release, the encyclopedias discuss an authors work/s in context including:

Circumstances in the authors’  lives that are reflected in their work
Historical Events affecting their work
Other authors and [...]

In a world in which a single issue of The New York Times (October 20, 2009) can report that artificial memories have been created in the brain of a fruitfly; wild fish have learned to “discriminate among  colors, patterns, and shapes, including new ones”; and radioactive isotopes in the whiskers of Antarctic fur seals contain a [...]

Like print encyclopedias and their online counterparts, museums run the gamut from extremely specialized to (at least as an ideal) comprehensive or encyclopedic in scope.   (I will limit my examples to art museums, although many museums straddle the boundaries of art, history, nature, and science.)  Examples of the specialized museum include New York’s Rubin Museum of Himalayan Art (limited to a [...]

Gale/Cengage announced today the launch of the digital Grzimek’s Animal Life Encyclopedia.  Grzimek’s covers over 4,000 species and includes thousands of images, maps, videos, audio clips, and links to articles and real-time web sites.  According to the press release, features of the newproduct include:
•    Articles written by scientists and subject experts, peer-reviewed by world-renowned authorities [...]

Selected Web Sites for Audio Books Readers’ Advisory
Audible, Inc. http://www.audible.com
A subsidiary of Amazon.com, Audible is a subscription service and the leading provider of spoken audio materials (books, newspaper, magazines, original work, radio and television programming). Works with Apple and Microsoft programs. Also available for use on Amazon Kindle. The complete catalog (over 60,000 [...]

All the Banned Books Week talk makes me wonder if any reference titles have been challenged or banned.  Rolf Janke from Sage Reference said the 2002 Encyclopedia of Terrorism, Edited by Kushner was on the list when it was first published.  I noticed a variety of Joy of Sex titles on lists as well.  I’ve [...]

Barbara’s post earlier this week about reviewing reference reminded me of an outline that I had created to help my students in writing a review, a required assignment in all my classes. Below is the complete outline and question list, and while a few of the questions are for readers’ advisory reference books, most [...]

When someone reads the entire Encyclopaedia Britannica or Oxford English Dictionary, it is so exceptional that it often seems to be the occasion for a book about the experience.  Nobody should be surprised, then, that when I reviewed Britannica for Reference Books Bulletin about ten years ago, I did not read every word.  I did not read [...]

I recieved so many wonderful responses from my post last week about my essential reference websites that I wanted to share them all.
Here the are the 4 favorite sites of Points of Reference Readers:
Mariann says: “As a law librarian, I love http://thomas.loc.gov/ and http://www.gpoaccess.gov/CFR/INDEX.HTML

Laura uses the free version of Hoover’s - http://www.hoovers.com/free/ and says it [...]

A few days ago, during a library orientation of 6th graders, the subject of pink dolphins came up.  A teacher had asked her students to produce evidence that they did or did not exist.  (The teacher had turned a student’s question into an assignment for the class.)
On the big screen, we searched the phrase “pink dolphin” in [...]

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 a [...]

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 I [...]

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 branch [...]

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 encyclopedias [...]

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 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, [...]

We are in the midst of a large weeding project in our reference collection here at the Wright State University Libraries.  We have about 19,000 volumes and need to decrease this by 1/3 in order to accommodate some new computers in our information commons.  I’m sure this is a common practice in libraries today.  As [...]