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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.


[1]
Reference Book Reviewing Media : A Critical Analysis / James Rettig. // In: Library Science Annual. - 2 (1986), pp. 13 - 15. (zurück)
[2]
Reference Book Reviewing Tools : How Well Do They Do the Job? / James H. Sweetland. // In: The Publishing and Review of Reference Sources. - New York : Haworth Press, 1986. - (The Reference Librarian ; 15), p. 66. (zurück)
[3]
To show how arbitrary some of these judgments may be: I had intended to give The 1995 National Directory of Bereavement Support Groups and Services as another example of the kind of public library-oriented reference work reviewed by LJ. How suprised I was to discover that it is the very first review of November 1995's Choice. (zurück)
[4]
This is also the subject of an article: The Reviewing of Foreign Language Reference Books : A Woeful Inadequacy / Donald C. Dickinson. // In: RQ. - 32 (Spring 1993),3, pp. 373 - 380. (zurück)
[5]
An Index of Publisher Quality for the Academic Library / John Calhoun and James K. Bracken. // In: College and Research Libraries. - 44 (May 1993),3, pp. 257 - 259. (zurück)
[6]
Outstanding Reference Sources : The 1995 Selection of Recent Titles / Dale F. Luschsinger. // In: American Libraries. - 26 (May 1995),5, p. 400. The Dartmouth Medal winner of 1995 was the Encyclopedia of the American Presidency. - New York : Simon & Schuster, 1994. (zurück)
[7]
See for example: When Bad Is Good Enough : The Lowest Common Denominator in Reference Publishing and Reviewing / David Henige. // In: Reference Services Review. - 19 (Spring 1991),1, pp. 7 - 14. - Reviewing Reference Publications : The Importance of Relevant Subject Knowledge ; Selected Case Studies / Richard A. Gray. // In: Reference Services Review. - 18 (Spring 1990),1, pp. 7 - 15. - This Will Never Do / Richard D. Altick. // In: Review 1 (1979), pp. 47 - 60. (zurück)

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