Points Of Reference – Reference Discussion for Librarians, from Booklist Online » Blog Archive » Subject Encyclopedias Dead or Alive
Booklist Online

Booklist Online: More than 130,000 book reviews for librarians, book groups, and book lovers - from the trusted experts at the American Library Association

| | | | | | | | | | |
Book Blog - Points of Reference - Booklist Online

Points of Reference

A Booklist Blog
This is the archive of the blog Points of Reference. From 2009-2012 a team of library reference experts talked about resources (books, databases, Web sites, e-books, and more) and publishing trends.

« »

Wednesday, January 5, 2011 4:03 pm
Subject Encyclopedias Dead or Alive
Posted by: Admin

Just finished reading an interesting article, "'The Rolls Royce of the Library Reference Collection': The Subject Encyclopedia in the Age of Wikipedia" in the latest issue of Reference and User Services Quarterly. The author, John W. East (University of Queensland in Australia) questions whether subject encyclopedias still have any value even online, never mind in print. He presents a chart showing articles downloaded from 30 subject encyclopedias available on Gale Virtual Reference Library at University of Queensland in 2008, noting that the results were "disappointing for a large university" that had invested a lot of money in the titles.  He goes on to look at  ways in which librarians can promote subject encyclopedias so that they are more heavily used. He surveyed the web sites of 20 libraries, and found just one, North Carolina State University Library, that he felt did a good job of providing access to its subject encyclopedias.  

Another point--West reminds those of us who still sometimes rail against Wikipedia that in fact Wikipedia has been instrumental in keeping the encyclopedia concept alive.


Leave a Reply



© 2013 Booklist Online. Powered by WordPress.
Quoted material should be attributed to:
Mary Ellen Quinn, Points of Reference (Booklist Online).




HOME | | AWARDS | GREAT READS | BLOGS | NEWSLETTERS | WEBINARS | MY ALERTS | MY LISTS | MY PROFILE | HELP | SUBSCRIBE
BOOKLIST PUBLICATIONS
American Library Association
http://pointsofreference.booklistonline.com/2011/01/05/subject-encyclopedias-dead-or-alive/
pointsofreference.booklistonline.com
crawl=CC-MAIN-2013-20
48829
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:SY3SJA66SPU2LVVITD4OS2MQBM43P7D4
<urn:uuid:ffaef628-24b9-42c6-b953-ba39e79ca226>
2013-05-25T13:17:07Z
69.195.104.236
sha1:A2HATQ5ZXFTJNAJLZZQEWPDBYRVNLZX5
<urn:uuid:4a3d9963-807c-440a-b6e1-9ba3c114245e>
http://pointsofreference.booklistonline.com/2011/01/05/subject-encyclopedias-dead-or-alive/
response
<urn:uuid:ac32c3c7-6213-4a79-9099-d1ecbe34cfda>
robots: classic
hostname: ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal
software: Nutch 1.6 (CC)/CC WarcExport 1.0
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2013-20
operator: CommonCrawl Admin
description: Wide crawl of the web with URLs provided by Blekko for Spring 2013
publisher: CommonCrawl
format: WARC File Format 1.0
conformsTo: http://bibnum.bnf.fr/WARC/WARC_ISO_28500_version1_latestdraft.pdf