The Reference Collection

Frost, William J. The Reference Collection: From the Shelf to the Web. Haworth Press, 2005

This is yet another volume in the Haworth Press series of co-publications with journals – in this case The Reference Collection. The besetting sin of the series is its relentless Americanism, with huge quantities of slang and dialect which render it almost completely inaccessible to the rest of the world and a very uneven quality of writing. Happily, this volume is much better. Its sixteen chapters cover a wide range of topics relevant to reference from school libraries to cyberplagiarism. That said, its references to websites are dominated by US resources, not all of which (such as US genealogical sites or car repair manuals) will be directly relevant to others. But it is well and fluently written, although it is not clear whether this reflects the quality of editing or the competence of reference librarians as a breed!

The book opens with a potted history of librarians and their reference collections by Landesman. This stretches back to Ninevah and is wittily written as well as being informative, with some interesting and quotable statistics from her own library in Utah on the growth and usage of electronic services. There is then something of a token – but none the less welcome - attempt at an international perspective from Austen who focuses on the Australian experience and consortial purchasing, with some brief notice of the rest of the English speaking world. Given the size of the topic, this is inevitably a little superficial but is well referenced.

Three chapters next cover types of library and reference publications. Puacz competently assesses the balance of print and reference resources in public libraries, focusing heavily on the material and saying nothing of user competences. Maxwell covers school libraries which he engagingly describes as “a solitary practice” and dwells on the digital lag which is holding them back. John Morse of Merriam-Webster presents the publishers perspective. He makes interesting points about the need for informed choice and the need for librarians to educate users in making such choices. Parker-Gibson produces a very good piece which describes student usage for assignments, describes faculty (mistaken) assumptions and expands on the importance of information literacy.

Three chapters like at generic issues and technology. Sharkey examines the nature, extent and causes of (cyber)plagiarism, although tending to assume it is a student problem. She lists several useful websites and has a very balanced view of the issues. Sowards presents the results of a survey which reviews library reference portals, identifying best practice and showing the state of play from one hundred libraries – a public and a university library from each of fifty states. Boss & Nelson evaluate four commercially available federated search tools and consider whether this is a useful addition to the reference librarian’s armoury. This is a good dispassionate piece.

The final third of the volume contains half a dozen disciplinary based guides to internet resources and a final chapter on the 100 Best Free Websites. The quality and style of these varies substantially. For example, the Humanities chapter covers history in a page, while the Social Sciences chapter covers the same ground in half a dozen pages. The focus is a little eccentric but heavily American. One will find out about FDA but not NICE approval of medicines, about baseball but not football, about the lives of the Presidents but not the Inter Parliamentary Union list of governments, CNN but not the BBC. However these chapters are well worth spending time on. They describe a wealth of sites and services and cover everything from the prosaic to the exotic.

The collection is unusual in being interesting, entertaining and useful. Not a common set of adjectives for a piece of professional literature.