Essential Articles 4 is a collection of articles reprinted from newspapers and magazines arranged under broad topic headings. The readership is not specified but is obviously pre‐graduate students doing project assignments. Back in 1990, when the first unnumbered volume of Essential Articles appeared, the publishers had obviously discerned a gap in the “What have you got on ...?” market; the droves of kids who stood before you at the enquiry counter, lacking information skills and motivation, expecting you to deliver instant info for their project files on whatever was the fashionable topic of the day. I exaggerate; a few of the lambs were enthusiastic and literate, but all of us faced the dilemma of deciding how much time we should spend doing what we thought the teachers ought to be doing. Then along came Essential Articles, a solution to our problem! Instead of the laborious search through indexes and abstracts, many of which were unsuited to the teenage punter, the tiresome retrieval of only marginally suitable articles from journals and papers, many of which we did not have and would arrive too late from elsewhere, or were on microfilm or online, etc., here was a robust custom‐designed “resource file” of bite‐sized feature articles from the press and popular journals, conveniently arranged for instant use. Just zoom in on the topic, dish out the page or two of newsy articles, down they go on the photocopier, photocopies in the project files and school bag, and back in the ring binder go the originals. Off goes a satisfied customer leaving cash in the photocopier for library funds! Many of us had already started to compile project files in response to this relentless surge of “topic junkies”, but here was someone doing it for us.
Essential Articles 2 followed in 1992 (up from 232 pages to 366), EA3 in 1994 (400 pages), and now the equally sized EA4. The number of topics covered has grown from 42 to 129, of which 28 are new in ER4. These include child abuse, inner cities, Internet, leisure, privacy, road rage, and terrorism. The sources in this volume are listed and classified as 14 national daily newspapers, 11 Sunday newspapers, six overseas and 51 regional papers (from the Belfast Telegraph to the Yorkshire Post), and 90 magazines/journals/weekly papers from Adobe Magazine, Asian Weekly and Autoworld, to Women’s Own, You and Your Wedding and Young People Now, The Oldie, Which? and, yes!, the Library Association Record are others. No Newsweek or Time magazine, though, which I find particularly useful for topic enquiries.
Content and presentation are excellent. The topics are well chosen and the articles readable and stimulating. Many of the writers are household names such as Melvyn Bragg, Andrew Neil, Germaine Greer, Simon Hoggart and Polly Toynbee. There is a frequent larding of photos, cartoons and tables, and rarely do the articles extend to more than two pages. The whole is attractively presented with clear type and uncluttered layout ‐better than the originals in fact! The contents pages list all but the briefest of items, giving an abstract of the article, and are generously spaced over 16 pages. At the end of the volume there are Teacher’s Notes (brief annotations to each of the articles), cross‐references to related articles, a list of sources, an author index, and a cumulated index to all four issues of the Essential Articles corpus.
The loose‐leaf format will cause librarians to ponder on how best the work is to be used, but a wall chart listing the contents of all four issues will assist promotion if it is decided to keep the loose leaf binders behind the counter and just issue what is asked for. “In summary, teachers and librarians need the best journalism, thematically arranged, on subjects that won’t date, to inspire discussion and written work. Essential Articles 4 offers this in a flexible and versatile format which is economical in terms of both time and money”. (Blurb). Admirably put!
Even I, no teenage project junkie, got absorbed in eating disorders, savage dogs, surrogate mothers and New Age Travellers. And once I had found Libraries: “Library cuts”, “More to libraries than getting wired”, “Talent nurtured in the stacks”, a Sunday Telegraph cartoon about library closures, and a news snippet about readers not wanting the classics, a reference caught my eye which had me ferreting in the stacks! Case proven! Essential for all libraries catering for fifth and sixth formers, and everybody else. Excellent value.
