Reference Book Reviewing for Academic Libraries in the United States
by
Stephen Lehmann
Serving as the primary filter between the 2000-plus reference books published every year in the United States and the country's 5000 academic libraries are five review journals: Choice, RQ, Reference Books Bulletin (RBB), American Reference Books Annual (ARBA), and Library Journal. Although other library-oriented journals publish reviews of reference books, these are the five that will be found, without question, on everyone's list of major review sources. Wilson Library Bulletin's "Current Reference Books" would have been a possible sixth; begun in 1938, it ceased publication in 1995, though it has been partially resurrected in online form (see below).
Like so much else in American librarianship, the apparent abundance of review journals is a consequence of and compensation for an entirely decentralized "system" that addresses the needs of a large and heterogenous market. Even though Choice, RQ, and RBB are all published by the American Library Association or one of its divisions, these divisions (of which there are eleven) are to a considerable extent autonomous and financially independent, even, to a degree, in competition with one another.
Certainly, each of these journals strives for its unique niche and
identity. Nonetheless, there are features they all share. In addition
to the obvious values (fairness, accuracy, etc.), the review journals
aim to be timely (in contrast to reviews in scholarly journals but
necessary if they are to guide librarians in making purchase
decisions); they attempt to provide reviews that stress comparisons to
other titles; and they are, all of them, limited to books in English
with a U.S. distributor. There seems to be relatively little overlap,
with as many as 90% of the total number of titles reviewed in only one
or two of the five journals.[1]
Choice
Of the five journals, only Choice is geared solely to academic
libraries. More specifically, it regards its primary audience as
librarians in four-year undergraduate institutions. It is published
eleven times a year by ALA's 9,600 member Association of College and
Research Libraries and includes approximately 60 reviews of reference
books per issue. Unlike other sections of the journal, where books are
reviewed by faculty, the reference reviews are written by librarians,
from a pool of almost 400. Founded in 1963, Choice has long been
closely connected to Books for College Libraries and is strongly
identified with, indeed epitomizes the infrastructure that supports
strong, user-oriented undergraduate collections. Given its very stable
and purposeful role in U.S. librarianship, Choice itself has become
something of an institution and is the object of innumerable studies
and articles. The present editor of its book review section, Bob
Balay, is also editor of the most recent supplement (1992) to the
tenth edition (1986) and to the forthcoming eleventh edition (1996) of
Guide to Reference Books.
Choice currently goes to about 5,500 subscribers (of whom 1,000
receive the reviews on card format) and is also available
electronically: on CD-ROM (SilverPlatter, updated quarterly) and
online via CARL (updated monthly). Though its reviews are short (a
paragraph), they are well edited and informative. Each November issue
lists approximately 200 titles in its "Forthcoming Reference Works,"
including price and anticipated month of publication.
The remaining journals are intended for both public and academic
librarians. Given the fact that Choice is relatively selective, the
small overlap in coverage among the titles reviewed, and perhaps a
certain compulsiveness that seems to go with the profession, many U.S.
reference librarians check all five sources routinely.
RQ
Though it is not stated anywhere in the publication, it is a safe
guess that RQ stands for Reference Quarterly. It is has a circulation
of about 6,000 and is the official journal of ALA's Reference and
Adult Services Division (4,600 personal members), which, it is worth
noting, has also organized two workshops on book reviewing in recent
years, each attended by over 100 librarians. Of the five journals, RQ
is the only one whose reviews are edited on a volunteer basis
(presently by David Kohl, director of the University of Cincinnati
Library.) It covers fewer books than the other sources (approximately
125 per year), though its reviews are typically somewhat longer than
Choice's. In addition to the reviews, RQ lists all other reference
titles and bibliographies it receives for review, adding another 500
titles to the annual count. Finally, in the section "Second Look," new
editions of standard sources, otherwise often passed over by review
editors, are reappraised critically.
Reference Books Bulletin
Reference Books Bulletin is the annual cumulation of the reference
book reviews appearing in the ALA's book review journal, Booklist.
Booklist goes to 28,000 subscribers, RBB to another 750. Edited
professionally on a full-time basis, it is aimed primarily at large
public libraries. Thus it generally excludes, for example,
bibliographies. In the words of editor Sandy Whitely, "People coming
into public libraries want books, not references to books." (Who, one
wonders, doesn't?) Uniquely among the five journals, its reviews are
anonymous. Books are assigned to one of twenty-five to thirty board
members, whose reviews then circulate among another four or five other
board members before getting a final look-over by Whitely. Reviews
vary considerably in length, but average two to three paragraphs. One
of RBB's most useful features is its "Omnibus Reviews" (signed), which
offer long and detailed comparative multi-book reviews, e.g.,
encyclopedias, quotation books, reference sources on food and cooking,
travel sources.
American Reference Books Annual
American Reference Books Annual aims to compensate for what it lacks
in timeliness with completeness, attempting in one large volume to
review within a year or two of its publication every reference book
published or distributed in the U.S. and Canada. In recent years this
comes to ove 2,000 books. (In a 1983 study, ARBA's coverage was found
to be actually 79% of the reference books listed in Book Review
Index.[2]) Annuals and other serial publications are included every
three years, at most. Reviews are typically a paragraph or two in
length. They have been described as "quirky," and indeed show less
editorial consistency than the rigorously edited reviews of Choice, or
the somewhat bland style of RBB. A relative strength of ARBA is its
coverage of reference books in science and technology, to which over
20% of its reviews are devoted (compared to Choice's 16%). Its general
editor, Bohdan W. Wynar, is also the owner of Libraries Unlimited,
publisher of ARBA and a long list of works in bibliography and
librarianship, though the day-to-day editorial work is carried out by
Associate Editor Ed Volz and a full-time assistant. ARBA's 350
reviewers are a mix of librarians (generally academic) and
university/college faculty. It has a circulation of 2,100.
Library Journal
In contrast to ARBA, Library Journal, which goes to approximately
24,000 subscribers 22 times a year, is distinguished above all by the
speediness of its listings: its reviews (approximately 10-25 per
issue) are written from galleys, thus appearing on librarians' desks
more or less concurrently with publication of the books (sometimes,
perforce, with no reference to indexes, illustrations, and other
features omitted from the galleys sent to reviewers.) In its
timeliness, LJ has an edge of at least three to four months over the
other journals. Nonetheless, the reviews are very short, and the
selection, including titles such as the Encyclopedia of Cat Health and
Care, is clearly geared primarily to public libraries.[3]
Supplementing the major review journals are several other important
sources which should be noted.
College & Research Libraries
College & Research Libraries' "Selected Reference Books," published in
each March and September issue, publishes about 40 brief reviews
annually and makes an attempt to include off-beat (e.g., not in
English) but important titles not likely to be reviewed elsewhere. Its
editor, Eileen McIlvaine, and its contributors are librarians at
Columbia University in New York. (McIlvaine's predecessors as editors
of this column were Constance M. Winchell and Eugene Sheehy, both,
like McIlvaine, at Columbia, and both editors of the Guide to
Reference Books.) It is fair to say that reference librarians across
the U.S. check this listing religiously.
WESS newsletter
The Western European Studies Section of ALA's Association of College
and Research Libraries publishes an annotated listing -- not reviews
-- of roughly fifty western European reference sources and
bibliographies twice a year in its WESS Newsletter. After the demise
of the Association of Research Libraries' Foreign Acquisitions
Newsletter (FAN), this became the only American journal to regularly
feature European reference publications.
Wilson library bulletin.
James Rettig, formerly reference book reviewer for the now defunct
Wilson Library Bulletin, has begun to publish his reviews online: as
of October 1995 about fifteen reviews of reference books per monthly
issue appear under the rubric "Rettig on Reference," described as "a
service of H. W. Wilson." Its URL is
http://www.hwwilson.com/retinro.html.
IFB abstracts
Also available online are English-language abstracts of reviews from
Informationsmittel für Bibliotheken, IFB Abstracts, via the URL
http://www.library.upenn.edu/ifba. Edited by three American
librarians, who coordinate a large team of American and British
abstractors, it is, like the listings in the WESS Newsletter, an
attempt to compensate for the language barrier otherwise
characteristic of the American library reviewing media.[4]
"Best" lists have an undeniable appeal, from which even librarians are
not immune. Choice's Outstanding Academic Books, published annually in
each January issue, so designates what seems to be a more or less
fixed percentage (9%) of the year's titles in each of the journal's
sections (including, of course, Reference). About half the selection
comes from those books that had been characterized as "essential,"
"outstanding," or "highly recommended" in the reviews, with the
remainder seemingly chosen in a manner described by one librarian
familiar with the journal's operations as an "exercise in randomness."
(The more alarming, then, the article published a few years ago which
proposes assessing library collections by matching the ratio of
publishers represented in the library's holdings to their
representation in the OAB list.[5] For those watching the balance
sheets, it is, of course, also an exercise in generating advertising
revenue. RASD's outstanding reference sources are listed in each May
issue of the official ALA journal, American Libraries, while Library
Journal announces its "Best Reference Books" every April. For most
librarians scanning these lists is, I suspect, like coming across
one's horoscope: hard to take seriously, hard to ignore. In addition,
RASD awards its annual Dartmouth Medal "to honor achivement in
creating reference works outstanding in quality and significance."[6]
American library-oriented book review journals get a large number of
responsibly written reviews into the hands of librarians quickly. They
are -- this is their accomplishment, but also their limitation
-- extremely focussed in helping librarians make effective selection
decisions: recommended or not recommended, buy or don't buy. (It has
been frequently charged that the reviews of American library journals
are, on the whole, too positive,[7] although informed and experienced
librarians know to read reviews critically and compensate
accordingly.) For reviews that are not only evaluative or descriptive,
but that see for themselves a larger educational role and give more of
the historical, intellectual, disciplinary and bibliographical
contexts in which reference works are written and published,
librarians turn to journals outside the library field, journals such
as American Historical Review, Women's Review of Books, and Gnomon.
Certainly reviews of this kind are becoming more readily available to
librarians thanks to very high quality, speedy, discipline-based
online review sources such as Bryn Mawr Classical Review in classical
studies and H-NET in the field of history. In any case, as IFB and its
American-based progeny, IFB Abstracts have shown, the Internet and the
Worldwide Web stimulate the production and dissemination of journals
in ways that are still very difficult to predict, and about which all
one can say with certainty is that the resulting changes will be
enormous.
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