The Reference Collection

Stay up-to-date with the growing amount of reference resources available online How important is the World Wide Web to information retrieval and communication? Important enough that information professionals have seen students exit from their libraries en masse when Internet service was lost. Internet providers dominate the indexing and abstracting of periodical articles as major publishers now offer nearly all of their reference titles in digital form. Libraries spend increasing amounts of funding on electronic reference materials, and librarians devote an increasing amount of time to assisting in their use. The Reference Collection: From the Shelf to the Web is an essential guide to collection development for electronic materials in academic and public libraries. The Reference Collection: From the Shelf to the Web tracks the continuing evolution of electronic reference resources-and how they're accessedin a variety of settings. Librarians representing university, elementary school, and public libraries in the United States and Australia examine how reference collections have evolved over time (and may soon be a thing of the past); how public and school libraries have dealt with the changes; why library research assignments have become more difficult for teachers to make and for students to complete; how to organize online reference sources; and why the nature of plagiarism has changed in the electronic era. The book also examines the use of electronic references from a publisher's perspective and looks at the most important Web-accessible reference toolsboth free and subscriptionin the areas of humanities, medicine, the social sciences, business, and education. The Reference Collection: From the Shelf to the Web also examines: - issues of authority, accessibility, cost, comfort, and user education in evaluating electronic resources - the formation of purchasing consortia to facilitate the transfer of reference materials from print to online formats - current literature and research findings on the state of digital versus print reference collections - what electronic publishing means to smaller reference books (dictionaries, almanacs, etc.) - the need for increased information literacy among students - the nature, extent, and causes of cyber plagiarism - the use of federated search tools - and includes a selected list of the top 100 free Internet reference sites The Reference Collection: From the Shelf to the Web is an essential resource for all reference and collection development librarians, and an invaluable aid for publishing professionals.

Linda S Katz

- Introduction (William J. Frost) - Getting it RightThe Evolution of Reference Collections (Margaret Landesman) - Out of the Stack and into the Net: International Perspectives on Academic Reference Resources (Gaynor Austen and Carolyn Young) - Electronic vs. Print Reference Sources in Public Library Collections (Jeanne Holba Puacz) - Digital versus Print: The Current State of Reference Affairs in School Libraries (D. Jackson Maxwell) - Reference Publishing in the Age of Also (John M. Morse) - From the Womb to the Web: Library Assignments and the New Generation (Necia Parker-Gibson) - Cyberplagiarism and the Library: Issues and Solutions (Jennifer Sharkey and F. Bartow Culp) - Structures and Choices for Ready Reference Web Sites (Steven W. Sowards) - Federated Search Tools: The Next Step in the Quest for One-Stop-Shopping (Steve C. Boss and Michael L. Nelson) - Internet Reference Sources in the Humanities (Dennis Dillon) - Science Reference on the Internet (Lori Bronars) - Medical Reference Sources on the Internet: An Evolving Information Forum and Marketplace (Gary A. McMillan) - Web-Based Reference Resources for the Social Sciences (Brian Quinn) - Briefcases and Databases: Web-Based Reference Sources for Business Librarians and Their Client Communities (Gail M. Golderman and Bruce Connolly) - Internet Reference Sources in Education (Linda C. Weber) - 100 Best Free Internet Web Sites: A Selected List (Lori Morse) - Index - Reference Notes Included