This edition of the American Library Association's Guide to Reference traces its roots through several editions of Guide to Reference Books back to 1902 and the publication of Alice Bertha Kroeger's (Drexel Institute) Guide to the Study and Use of Reference Books: A Manual for Librarians, Teachers and Students.¹

Part textbook, part vade mecum, part bibliography, part canon, Kroeger's slender volume grew in bulk and stature over the decades to become a cornerstone of the literature of librarianship. By the mid-20th century, the Guide was being used throughout North America as a course textbook in library schools and was being sold internationally as the "source of first resort" for identifying local materials to answer users' questions, training reference staff in the repertory of works with which they should be familiar, inventorying and developing reference collections, enabling interlibrary loan staff to identify sources for request verification, and serving as a gateway to the wider repertory of the reference literature.

After Kroeger's death in 1909, the Guide became a project of the General Reference Department of the Columbia University Libraries under compilers and editors Isadore Gilbert Mudge, Constance Winchell, and Eugene Sheehy and was compiled at Columbia until Sheehy's retirement in 1986. Librarians who attended Columbia's famous library school and worked at the reference desk in Butler Library remember working on the Guide as an aspect of their daily activities. To this day, successor librarians to Sheehy continue to compile for College and Research Libraries occasional updates to the Guide using its familiar format and entry numbering.

The general editorship passed for the 10th edition supplement and the 11th edition to Robert Balay of the Association of College and Research Libraries' Choice magazine. After some years of discussion at ALA, the current edition was announced in May 2000 with the appointment of Robert Kieft as general editor. It is, in effect, the centennial edition; it is the first to list sources on the Web and the first to be issued in electronic form. Although many readers fondly remember and retain on their home or office bookshelf their copy of a Winchell or Sheehy edition, ALA Publishing and the editorial team decided in the fall of 2001 to publish not in print but online to integrate the Guide with the burgeoning network of online resources. The new edition, therefore, takes full advantage of the Web's capacities to connect information sources; released from the constraints of a physical volume, it also creates and links to content that makes it a center for learning about and practicing reference librarianship.²

1. See the "Publication History" in Stuart W. Miller's "'Monument': Guide to Reference Books," in Distinguished Classics of Reference Publishing, ed. James Rettig (Phoenix, AZ: Oryx Press, 1992, 129–37).
2. For views about how the Guide might develop, see Robert H. Kieft, "When Reference Works Are Not Books: The New Edition of the Guide to Reference Books," RUSQ 41, no. 4 (2002): 330–34. Since the publication of that article, many more possibilities have arisen with the development of new technologies and in discussion with librarians; these are discussed in a successor article by Kieft, "The Return of the Guide to Reference (Books)," RUSQ 48, no. 1 (2008): 4–10.

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