The Reference Collection

A library's reference collection is its information central. The items in this collection cannot be checked out so that they are readily available to "refer" to at a moment's notice. The collection will include material on a range of subjects in various formats, but the common feature of all of them is that they contain concise information—definitions, articles, addresses, citations or brief biographies for example—suitable for providing factual data and overviews of subjects. Libraries now provide reference sources in both print and electronic form.

Types of Reference Resources

Almanacs

Almanacs or handbooks are collections of facts, statistics and lists gathered together in a convenient format for easy reference. There are subject-specific almanacs and general almanacs. Both are available in both print and electronic form. Unlike so many other things, however, general almanacs are the rare case where the print version is actually simpler to use because keyword searching results in very imprecise results that must be sorted through. Subject specific handbooks, however, can be accessed conveniently in an electronic format.

Several subject handbooks are available in Oxford Reference Online Premium. There are guides to various scientific fields, religion, history, literature, and social sciences among others. An invaluable general almanac is the annual World Almanac. Although this is available through FirstSearch, it is much easier to search the print edition. One government handbook that is a standard statistical resource is the Statistical Abstract of the United States. The government now makes this available for free online as well.

Atlases

Atlases are collections of maps. They may or may not also provide other kinds of supporting material related to the geography of the region depicted in the maps. Atlases may provide information about the physical characteristics of places, their economies and agriculture, their politics and/or their history.

A gazetteer, on the other hand, provides brief descriptions of geographical locations without an accompanying map.

Bibliographies

Bibliographies are collections of references to information sources on particular topics or individuals. They may be subdivided if a topic is sufficiently large. Often they will be divided into sections by the type of material being cited, so that all of the book sources are grouped together, all journal articles in another section, etc. or to distinguish primary source material from secondary sources.

Bibliographies can be invaluable sources of information on a given topic, but once in a published form will necessarily not include the most recent research. They often, however, contain a more detailed list of earlier research on the subject than other sources.

Book-length bibliographies will often be shelved separately from where the topics themselves are located: in the 016s in Dewey Decimal systems and in the Z's in collections using the Library of Congress system.

Biographical Resources

Reference collections typically include many biographical resources. There are collections of mini biographies divided by category: profession, gender, year, race, or religion. Depending on the source, an entry may range from a couple of paragraphs to several pages in length. It may focus on specific aspects of an individual's accomplishments depending on the nature of the particular reference. Biographical information may be included in other kinds of reference resources, such as encyclopedias or handbooks. A biography of Sigmund Freud in the Encyclopedia of Psychology may be significantly different from one about him the Dictionary of Literary Biography.

Another type of biographical resource are biographical directories, such as the Who's Who series. These provides a skeletal selection of facts about each person as well as contact information. Some resources, such as the American National Biography (also available online) only include information about people who have died. Others, such as Current Biography, focus on news makers, including obituaries of significant people who have died during the covered time period as well as in depth profiles of people whose activities have made them significant.

Dictionaries

Dictionaries provide definitions of words as well as information about pronunciation, syllable breaks and usage. Specialized dictionaries may trace word origins, help users spell words, or translate words from one language to another. Other specialized dictionaries may define terminology for a particular field, such as physics. Unabridged dictionaries try to offer definitions of most of the words currently in use as well as a certain number of word roots and out-of-date terms. Most dictionaries are abridged, meaning that they focus on the most frequently used words as well as prefixes and suffixes and sometimes common root words. Closely related to dictionaries, thesauruses provide synonyms for words.

The standard source for determining the origin of English words is the Oxford English Dictionary. This is also available online. The standard collegiate dictionary and thesaurus from Merriam Webster are also available online. Several bilingual dictionaries are available online in Oxford Reference Online Premium as are several subject-specific dictionaries.

Note: Not everything called a dictionary is one. Sometimes things named a dictionary are actually an encyclopedia or handbook, providing much more detailed information than a dictionary would.

Directories

Directories collect together contact information (telephone, address, email, names of individuals to contact) for a particular group of people or organizations. The group may be determined:

• geographically (like a phone book or city directory)
• professionally (like Thomas Register of American Manufacturers)
• by common interest (College Board College Handbook)

Although it is increasingly easy to locate contact information on the internet, the virtue of print directories is the convenient way in which they consolidate all of the information related to a particular topic, profession or area. If, for example, you want to know which publishers are interested in new science fiction writers, the Writer's Market is a much more convenient method of locating the information than a web search.

Encyclopedias

Encyclopedias present overview articles about particular topics or individuals. General encyclopedias strive to provide introductory coverage of a comprehensive range of topics. Examples of general encyclopedias include World Book and Encyclopedia Britannica. Encyclopedia Britannica is also available online (in the full-text subscription version rather than the shortened entry version available on the open web). Funk & Wagnalls general encyclopedia is available in EbscoHost. On the open internet, Microsoft's Encarta is generally accessible. So too is Wikipedia — a product of collective creation (a wiki) by thousands of contributors and editors who update, revise and edit entries through a complex collective process. While Wikipedia lacks the authority of some of the other resources, its greatest strength is its currency. Recent events will have initial entries in a matter of hours and will be continuously updated while older entries will rapidly reflect changes in understanding or events. General encyclopedia articles are not usually regarded as suitable for college-level work and should be used for background understanding only.

Subject-specific encyclopedias present articles related to a particular topic. Often topics may be general topics (i.e.., religion) examined from the perspective of the subject under consideration. It may be useful for this reason to compare the entries for a single topic in different subject-specific encyclopedias to see the differences in perspective. The entries in subject-specific encyclopedias, which are written by specialists in the fields under examination, are frequently signed, although in some cases the signature may take the form of initials. (In that case the reader will need to locate the list in the front or back of the volume that matches the initials with particular authors.) The suitability of subject-specific encyclopedia articles for research projects depends upon the nature of the project and the requirements of the assignment and the instructor. Because the authors are specialists, and the since the articles are often lengthy and detailed, instructors will often permit using encyclopedia entries in papers.

Some subject specific encyclopedias are available electronically as well as in print. The GroveArt and GroveMusic offer encyclopedic access to those subjects in an electronic form while AccessScience is the electronic version of the McGraw-Hill Encyclopedia of Science and Technology. The convenience of these tools shouldn't tempt you to steer away from the dozens and dozens of special-subject encyclopedias in print, however. Far more material remains available in print than online, and the situation is likely to remain so for some time to come.

Note: Not all things that are an encyclopedia are called one. The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians is a multi-volume set that clearly would be categorized as an encyclopedia.

Quotation Dictionaries

Quotation dictionaries are tools for finding the source and precise wording of quotations and sayings. They can also be used to find appropriate quotations on particular topics. Oxford Reference Online Premium offers access to the various Oxford dictionaries of quotations, while the familiar Bartlett's Quotations is available for free to all users at Bartleby.com. The catch with Bartleby's edition is that it is the 1919 edition, so don't go looking for quotations from anybody turning a phrase in the last 85 years!

And REMEMBER, if you have trouble with this, or any other stage in the research process, you can ask for Help! Ask your teacher! Ask Librarians! If you need to, just hit the PANIC button!

For information about this, or any other Library Web Page, contact the Library.

Created February 11, 2005
Revised March 22, 2006
Ruth Burridge Lindemann © Danville Area Community College