The Good Library Blog

When the CEO of a publishing company gives us a brief paragraph talking up some dictionaries he publishes, it hardly counts as convincing evidence that the market for reference books in general is buoyant. Librarians can rightly claim that reference books in libraries are in decline and needed less, and agree with you that reference books are neither finished nor dying. It’s a matter of degree, and it is easy to think of lots of previously standard information books which have been made redundant by the web. On the other hand I can’t think of an ‘abundance of high quality published reference material, only available in book form.’ I think that your post would have more force if you gave us 10 examples for starters.

What a fruitful discussion this could be. I think Richard was describing how competitive the market is, which is an uncontroversial thing to say.

Nevertheless I shall start the list with the Oxford History of Art series. Those are brilliant titles.

Most reference works which are authored and edited will be candidates. There are a few freely available on the internet, but moslty the internet rivals are inferior. How about Lonely Planet Guides?

Are TEFL dictionaries available on the internet?

A very good friend was looking for a "Guide to retreats" last year. There is one in paperback I believe.

Philip, The point I was trying to make (obviously unsuccessfully) was that dictionaries are a highly competitive market. You have raised a different and more interesting issue concerning the value of reference books in print in a web world. I have suggested that a number of 'experts' contribute to the debate - Adam Hodgin at exact editions, John Dove at xrefer, Karen Christensen at Berkshire Publishing for instance. Let's see what they have to say. Richard

Berkshire publishes print reference books on lively timely subjects, commissions bright interesting covers, fills the pages with sidebars and historical extracts and quotations as well as authoritative articles, so the volumes will be engaging and browsable (I’m including a quote below to back up this claim). Then a library buys a set--on a popular subject like world sport or terrorism--and sticks it on a dark, inaccessible shelf in a separate room or area in between dreary old serial editions bound in that hideous old tan or gray cloth. No one sees it, unless they happen to want to ask a librarian to help them.

Surely the issue is choosing new works relevant to the library’s readers, making them accessible, displaying them attractively (oh, how I long to see one of our sets on a table or shelf where people could get their hands on it!), and getting rid of the out-of-date (and ugly!) stuff that is so off-putting to modern library visitors.

What I worry is that reference librarians feel that they’ll be out of a job if they don’t make it hard to find reference material so users need to go through them if they want anything at all. This threat to jobs needn't be true at all: information experts are still much needed. But kids—and most adults—have become an independent information seekers. They don't want an intermediary the minute they walk in the door to find good reference material. By the way, reference works can be the best first port of call, because they have succinct but complete overviews of huge numbers of subjects, and further reading lists, so they can be a portal into the rest of the library's collection.

Thanks, Richard and Tim, for bringing this up! Karen (writing from Beijing).

Here's that quote, from Against the Grain magazine: “The Berkshire Encyclopedia of World History is, truly, a fun reference tool for students of all ages. McNeill and his editorial team, along with the gifted contributors, have created a reference set packed with information, but reading and absorbing its contents hardly seems like work. When I decided to study history in college, my mother gave me a book in the D.K. Eyewitness Guides series about medieval castles. That book made me fall in love with leaning about people's pasts and discovering the rich stories that, combined, lead us to a better understanding of our place in the world. The Berkshire Encyclopedia of World History evokes in me the same excitement and fulfillment but on a much grander scale. High School, public, and academic libraries will benefit from adding it to their collections and promoting its use at the reference desk.”

There are still a lot of things that books (well conceived, compiled and designed) can do better than websites. But there are undeniably things that websites can do very well which books struggle to keep up with. 'Keeping up with rapid changes' is one of the things that a web site can be more elegantly and effectively than a printed volume. So it is not surprising that Dictionaries, where the changes are glacial and marginal year by year, seem to be a pretty good bet in comparison to general knowledge cyclopedias. Wikipedia will do better on the population of Calcutta or the Leader of the House of Representatives than any print volume. But on the meanings of words and reliable guidance to their use: Printed books still win hands down.

I think the real challenge from the web is towards the authors and compilers of reference works. There are now so many attractive tools (wikis, blogs, Flickr, YouTube) for building an information resource on and using the web, that the next generation of compilers will be seduced by the web before they get round to the filing cabinets and cardindexes of the traditional book compiler. The challenge for a book publisher then becomes how to harness this creative compilation enthusiasm to make a good book, as well as a good web site. Not easy, but the next Dorling Kindersley, Duden, Larousse will do that......

One of the paradoxes of a good reference book is that most of it never gets 'read' or 'consulted'. In a paradoxical way this is where websites also have an advantage. They can be even more boringly useful than big books, because they can be indefinitely extended. Wikipedia is very good because most of it is boring beyond belief (unless you happen to have a fascination for Roumanian railways, or the humour of Monty Python, or the lineup of Fiorentina......on all of which it is better than you would credit.

Adam

Many thanks- that all sounds plausible and true. Do you have some titles you would like to recommend?

Tim

Pretty big question that.
Assuming that we are talking about a UK local/regional library. I would say that there are three ranges of books for which I would expect a good supply in my local library....
Pevsner guides to the Architecture of the counties (all the neighbouring counties also, so any good local library should have at least 6 volumes if not the complete set). Bilingual dicitionaries for all the major European languages. Top of the range culinary reference titles. Eg Oxford Companion to Food. World Atlas of Wine. Larousse GastronomiqueOxford Companion to WineEtc
These are all areas where the web equivalents are basically not as useful, not as authoritative and the books look great (eg World Atlas of Wine.....

Also. World atlas job is now done very well by Google Maps/Earth and MSFT but historical atlases are beautiful books which have not been too well emulated on the web yet!

Reference has always been about meeting the dual objectives of finding facts and getting context. The web has exploded with a myriad ways to find facts (sometimes with lots of 'wish-they-were-facts' thrown in), but getting authoritative context and making sense of what you've found elsewhere--that is still at a premium. It represents a business opportunity for those who do it well.

Top publishers and top aggregators like Xrefer, among others, are continually inventing new ways to make compelling exploration of context online. In Xreferplus a user can not only ask about extensive data on Armenia, but can also ask for a table of data comparing Armenia with each of its neighbours. Or compare in multiple columns events in Australian history related to military events with those related to the aircraft industry. You could do the same in a physical book only by flipping back-and-forth between chapters.

In the physical world a significant percentage of a library's floor-space, shelf-space, and staffing is devoted to the reference function which offers the library visitor a welcoming place to get oriented, start their access to the whole library, come back to get oriented on the landscape of a field of interest--all things which improve significantly their use of the library as a whole.

Those who are assembling the digital library resources to equip their communities or institutions are recognizing that a significant portion of their expenditure needs to be on the reference component as well; and that well-organized and presented reference content, integrated into their other online resources (and those of the web) will significantly improve their patrons' use of all the other online resources.

Yes, the market for reference is shifting. Print has its role for some resources, but there is both use and revenue to be gained by making the resources available online as well. Lorraine Estelle, the Collections Team Manager for JISC reported in ‘EPS Focus Report: The Future of Reference Publishing’, October, 2005, Electronic Publishing Services, London:

‘Reference works are very popular with our community with online reference resources at the top in terms of the number of institutions subscribing to particular types of resources. Strong reference brands tend to attract high levels of subscribers. . . .’

At Xrefer we have a strong demand for new content from our library customers. For example, public libraries in England are frequently requesting more and more bi-linguals given the changing population mix in their communities, so we will be adding a Polish-English bi-lingual. Last year we added a UK-USA bi-lingual, ‘Divided by a Common Language’! And we'll soon be announcing a reference collection available online of 10,000 biographies of cricketing legends from Wisden. (Thank you, Richard Charkin, for introducing us to Wisden.)

We've recently completed changes to our publishing process so that we can now economically repurpose many of those reference titles that Tim Coates mentions are ‘only available in book form’ and give them both accessibility to online users and valuable revenue for the publishers.

John makes an important point in highlighting the exciting new ways of searching electronic reference works and the added value this is bringing to users. X Refer, Oxford Online and others have already achieved much in this respect and there's more to follow.
I would also highlight the much wider availability of reference books that has been made possible by the transfer to electronic media. The smallest libraries which previously had perhaps 6 or 7 reference books and the larger ones that had perhaps a couple of dozen now have hundreds of titles available electronically through subscriptions to Oxford, Gale, X Refer, Britannica, World Book and the others.
This hardly fits with the assertion that "Reference books in libraries are in decline". The electronic revolution in reference provision has radically widened availability of hard, quality information for those using library services 'in person' and those who prefer remote access.
Here is an aspect of library services that is in no way declining and that is worth applauding.

May I bring the discussion back to a simpler level? I have noticed that hotel guides on the internet, in the experience of my family, have always recommended bad hotels. We have learned it is a mistake to book a hotel on the basis of what one is told on an internet site.

On the other hand the traditional guide books: The AA hotel guide, Michelin etc are generally extremely reliable. This is about editorial and brand reputation to which, presumably, the same fundamentals will apply whatever the medium.

Does anyone else have similar examples?

The lack of awareness of library reference resources stems in part from the way the publishing industry and library world operate together. Publishers seem to focus all their marketing efforts on librarians with purchasing authority and on the library press, without reaching students, the public, or even, in the case of larger institutions, the librarians who actually deal with people. I once went to a panel entitled, “The Weakest Link: Publisher, Aggregator, or Librarian?” and came away thinking that they (or we) were all rather weak links. The issue is that too many librarians are afraid of disintermediation--that is, of people going straight to the shelves or database themselves, thus putting the powers that be in a better position to eliminate their jobs. I have met librarians who wanted desperately to believe that students could not find good information without their help.

Besides that, there is the question of what the role of a library should be—education, entertainment, public place—and to what extent should the librarian care what readers actually want, rather than providing what’s good for them. It’s like the junk food in schools debate. I think I would say, with many readers of this blog, that a varied diet is a good thing, and that nourishing food is not necessarily nasty tasting—in fact quite the contrary.

I have a few reference sets I recently purchased from my local library that I would like to donate to a library that would appreciate them. Can someone clue me in as to how and/or where I can accomplish this? To give you an example of sets I have, 'Modern Women Writer's, Play Index & The Scribner Encyclopedia of American Lives'. I have others. They are like new having seen minimal to no use and have very minimal library markings. Thanks for any help.