This is a collection of essays taking as its theme the migration of reference sources from print to the web. It starts off brightly with Margaret Landesman's historical look at what is generally meant by a reference collection – authoritative lists, directories, dictionaries, encyclopaedias – and contemplates the issues of information accessibility down the ages. Landesman maintains that in the online age specialist information skills are still very much in demand: “Users frequently need more, rather than less, assistance to find needed sources … the needle in the haystack was hard enough to find when there was only one haystack. Now the number of haystacks is multiplying.”
With this reassuring news for librarians under its belt, the book goes on to consider the place of reference collections in each of the major sectors – university, school, public, though interestingly not industrial or commercial. Gaynor Austen and Carolyn Young review developments in the academic community from an international perspective, showing how different local conditions, such as Australia's large distance learning communities or South Africa's transitional educational structure, contribute to the different patterns of electronic collection adoption. Jeanne Holba Puacz discusses the role of reference collection development in public libraries, with a special emphasis on evaluating and comparing web and print sources and, rather optimistically in view of public library budgets, making local information and archives more accessible through digitisation projects. Jackson Maxwell rounds off the sector surveys with a look at the issue of digital versus print in school libraries. Although Maxwell enthusiastically points to online resources available to teachers and school librarians, he is slightly pessimistic about the short‐term prospects for digital projects in schools, citing staffing and technological difficulties and a reluctance to commit substantial sums of money from stretched budgets to convert print collections into electronic.
John Morse, President of Merriam‐Webster, discusses reference publishing in what he calls the “Age of Also” – this is where print co‐exists with electronic for a while, each supplying a need in the information marketplace. He explains that, although many multi‐volume items such as encyclopaedias are now no longer being printed, other items such as dictionaries are still being bought in print for their convenience, while the online version has added‐value features such as spelling help and audio pronunciations. Steven Sowards presents the results of a survey of 100 public and academic libraries’ ready‐reference web sites and evaluates their design. Other essays consider the issues of plagiarism, university students using the internet for library assignments and the difficulties encountered when selecting and evaluating sources, federated search tools to make searching for reference materials easier across multiple databases.
The final third of the book is devoted to listing online reference sources in various subject areas such as science, medicine, the humanities, etc. These are annotated – some to a greater extent than others. Given the subject of this book, I could not help wondering why those interested in the such listings do not just go to any of the numerous subject gateways available online. I would have appreciated a chapter devoted to the financial implications of building electronic reference collections, covering such issues as pricing structures, bundled offers, licenses, digitisation costs and so on. Nonetheless, this is a very useful collection of essays and will be of interest to anyone working in the area of collection development or online reference work.
