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Although Munich’s Oktoberfest is winding down there are plenty of other beer festivals to enjoy this month.    At the Home of the Beer Festival Calendar you’ll find listings for everything from Acadia’s Oktoberfest (Southeast Harbor,Maine) to Zoo Brew (Cincinnati,Ohio) as well as beer festivals throughout the year (and the world).  An important event in beer history took place on October 5, 1842 [...]

The National Archives has a fascinating site, digitalvaults.org which contains 1,200 documents of historical records of the US.  Included are digitized photos, maps and artwork plus audio files and video clips.   "Shuffle records" is an introduction that provides examples of documents from 1800 to the present.  Keyword or searching by tag results in the [...]

Wonderful news today from ProQuest. They will continue the tradition of publishing the Statistical Abstract of the United States, beginning with the 2013 edition (in print and digital formats).  They will partner with Bernan Press who will continue the tradition of publishing the print edition.   No word on pricing at this time.  Here is [...]

Legend has it that each year the swallows return to California's San Juan Capistrano Mission on St. Joseph's Day, March 19th.  The "Fiesta de las Golondrinas," a month-long celebration in the city of San Juan Capistrano, includes  a Swallows Parade. A look at  the American Birding Association's  Birding Festivals Directory  (searchable by state, country and month), proves that swallows [...]

In a move that is sure to rock the world of reference, Encyclopaedia Britannica has just announced that it will no longer publish a print edition. Read more about it at http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/03/13/after-244-years-encyclopaedia-britannica-stops-the-presses/

If the popularity of the first two seasons of PBS's Downton Abbey is any indication, there are more than a few of us (5.4 million viewers for this season's finale) interested in the British aristocracy, if only as characters in a television drama. As we await the third series we can amuse ourselves online . [...]

Crossword puzzle dictionaries are a staple in most reference collections.  Two of the most popular are the Random House Webster's Crossword Puzzle Dictionary (Random House Reference, 2006) and The American Heritage Crossword Puzzle Dictionary (Houghton Mifflin, 2003).  As helpful as they are, they don't always have the answer to every cruciverbalist's query.  OneAcross.com is the [...]

Credo Reference has a number of publisher collections which feature the titles from an individual publisher.  They are available for purchase or subscription in Credo, but are generally not part of the Credo General Reference collection.  Credo just announced a new collection from Marshall Cavendish - 9 titles/70 volumes.  Here is more from the press [...]

RUSA/CODES Reference Publishing Discussion Forum: Life after the Statistical Abstract. What will the proposed demise of the Statistical Abstract mean for reference librarians and library users?  Now in its 130th annual edition, Statistical Abstract has played a central role in guiding users to statistics since before we were born.   Since finding statistics can be challenging [...]

...but no longer use. Each day as I walk to the reference desk, I see the bright red and blue colors of the spine of the Encyclopedia of Associations. That work is dear to my heart because it was one of the very first -- if not THE first -- reference source that I learned about [...]

The following is a summary of the presentation from Paul Kobasa of World Book Inc. Paul represents the perspective of the traditional encyclopedia publisher/editor.                                                      World Book in a Wikipedia World Paul A. Kobasa Vice President, Editorial Editor in Chief World Book, Inc. Conventional Criteria to Evaluate a Reference Source. Which Still Apply Today? [...]

Here's some news on the dictionary front: the Chicago Assyrian Dictionary is finally finished. The project was started back in 1921 by James Breasted, founder of the University of Chicago's Oriental Institute. He envisioned a six-volume dictionary, modeled on the Oxford English Dictionary, that would take two or three decades to complete. Instead, the project expanded to 21 volumes [...]

Those of us  that were librarians in the early nineties remember the excitement of Encarta, the CD-ROM encyclopedia produced by Microsoft.  Now less than  twenty years later technology has progressed to the online encyclopedia. Wikipedia appeared in 2001 and many librarians (myself included), were skeptical.  How could a free online encyclopedia be written by anyone [...]

While I was getting ready for work this morning, I heard this on NPR's Morning Edition about what a boon it is for fashion researchers, writers, and designers to have free access to the online Berg Fashion Library via New York Public Library. It's good for reference publishing when a reference work jumps over the garden wall and [...]

The first few years of the current century saw a publishing flurry of reference works on women. Last week, in honor of Women's History Month,  I wrote a post about some key women's history resources. Here are a few more. The four-volume Oxford Encyclopedia of Women in World History was published in 2008. Unlike Gale's 17-volume Women [...]

For Women's History Month I'm taking a look at a few important women's history reference sources. Back in 1971, Harvard University Press published the landmark Notable American Women, 1607-1950. The project had been proposed as early as 1955 as a companion but also a  corrective to Dictionary of American Biography, which included only 706 women among its nearly 15,000 [...]

Just received this announcement from EBSCO: EBSCO Publishing (EBSCO) and Credo Reference, the online reference service, have extended their partnership allowing the reference content from Credo Reference to be discoverable within EBSCO Discovery Service (EDS). Metadata from Credo General Reference, Credo Topic Pages and Publisher Collections will be added to the EDS Base Index. The [...]

Dictionary lovers (you know who you are) will welcome the new 3-volume Green's Dictionary of Slang. "Green" is Jonathon Green, the expert who compiled Cassell's Dictionary of Slang and Chambers Slang Dictionary, among others. The new dictionary, with over 53,000 entries, definitions of more than 100,000 words, and more than 400,000 citations, is based on historical principles, meaning that [...]

Issues surrounding the environment are big in the news these days, and big in trade and educational publishing too, as Booklist's March 1 Spotlight on the Environment highlights. Reference publishers have been busy delivering relevant materials as well. Berkshire, for example, has a 10-volume Encyclopedia of Sustainability (also available online). The first part, The Spirit of Sustainability, came [...]

This week's peek is prompted by current events at home and abroad. Works such as The  International Encyclopedia of Revolution and Protest: 1500 to the Present (Wiley-Blackwell, 2009) and  Rebels and Renegades: A Chronology of Social and Political Dissent in the United States (Routledge, 2002), not to mention Historical Encyclopedia of American Labor (Greenwood, 2004) remind us how [...]