GUIDE TO REFERENCE INTRODUCTION

Robert Kieft, General Editor

The Guide to Reference, formerly Guide to Reference Books, has a long history in print as a core publication of librarianship in the United States. In this edition it celebrates its transformation as an online publication. This new Guide is, in effect, the centennial edition; it is the first to be published electronically and the first to engage the capacities and challenges of the Web as a medium for reference publishing and services.

The 12 years since the appearance of the last edition of the Guide in 1996 have witnessed the most exciting time in the history of librarianship since the elaboration of its modern practice in the later 19th century. The cultural forces attendant on the Web and the possibilities for information creation, publication, and distribution that the Web enables have in a very short period opened up new territories for user services at the same time that they have challenged the library's position in society. We librarians are reinventing almost everything having to do with the way we gather and give access to materials, offer our services, and relate to publishers, vendors, and the network of collecting institutions.

Reference librarians have lead this process of reinvention by using technologies to reach users in new and convenient ways, whether by developing online guidance or by interacting with them through chat, IM, or social networking. Working with users online and at a distance— moving the reference desk online as it were—and developing online collections and search/discovery mechanisms all play a part in the current process of reinvention.

The exponential increase in the amount of information available and the dominance of "search" in our thinking about finding information place an ever greater premium on being able to get quickly to information that is reliable and usable. Here is where the new Guide is ideally situated for 21st-century reference. We know that, in addition to the behavior of the reference librarian and the motivation of the user, quality user service depends on the reference sources available and the librarian's judgment or expertise in identifying and locating relevant information. Online catalogs, wonderful though they are, do not help users readily identify reference works, nor can they identify the most appropriate sources for a given need. Moreover, although search is almost miraculous for its needle-in-a-haystack retrieval capacity, it does not create the context for learning that a browseable, selective, and annotated "library" of proven reference sources can.

The new Guide gains value in the new world of information by deploying the expertise of its compilers in the online network, establishing a repertory of trusted go-to sources, calling attention to sources that librarians might miss as they search the Web or a library catalog, and offering guidance, not just an array of possibilities, in the form of introductory essays and annotations for entries. In these ways, librarians and LIS students can not only find their way through the maze of possible sources but develop their local collection and learn about topics they are not familiar with as they work with users.

The edition of the Guide, then, breaks new ground in terms of the sources it lists and the medium in which it is published, but it also incorporates the traditions established by its predecessors, traditions appropriate to the era of electronic publication. As all editions attest, beginning with Alice Bertha Kroeger's first in 1902 through Robert Balay's 11th in 1996, the Guide has always been a portal to the reference literature and has depended on participation by reference librarians and others concerned with education for and the practice of reference librarianship. Indeed, the Guide increasingly became in its first 11 editions a community project, for, even in the editions produced by the general reference department at Columbia University, a quick look at the acknowledgments and the credits on the table of contents reveals how important the network of reference libraries and librarians has been to the Guide's compilation. As a gateway, therefore, and as a communally built resource, the old Guide finds itself in its latest incarnation to be as modern as Web 2.0. With its searchable, browseable, internally and externally linked database, its distributed compilation and editing, and its interactive features, the online Guide is at once a new portal and communal publication and the same one it has always been.

As readers of the introductory matter to previous editions will recognize, the purpose of the Guide has been to offer a usably comprehensive, not exhaustive, repertory of sources for answering questions, directing researchers, creating local instructional materials, educating and training library school students and reference staff, and inventorying and developing reference collections. Readers familiar with previous editions also know that the compilers worked with the same issues that we on the current editorial team have—the growth and specialization of the reference literature, the changing face of the disciplinary landscape, and organizing the Guide for the ways library users categorize their work needs, not to mention how to define a reference work and how to choose the sources to enter.

Having asked many of the same questions as our predecessors, we have also been challenged to arrive at answers that speak to the sea change in reference publishing, information-seeking behavior, and modes of reference service since the advent of the Age of the Web in the mid-1990s. This reconfiguration of the reference landscape by the tremendous new opportunities the Web offers for reference publishing and information service/access requires that our editorial choices speak to a very different environment from that of our predecessors. In addition, then, to creating new topical categories, wrestling with how to fit new kinds of sources into the taxonomy, and reconfiguring cross-references, we have also felt it necessary and found it possible, given that we are no longer constrained by the limitations of a printed volume, to restore headnotes (we call them Editor's Guides) to categories and to offer more comparative and evaluative advice in our annotations.

We hope that the restoration of kinds of content that had been deemphasized in the printed Guide by the expansion of the bibliography and the publication of reference education/training textbooks is only the first step in bringing the Guide back to the classroom and reference desk as more than a list of sources. We plan eventually to create around the Guide's vital bibliographic dimension content that will be useful for training LIS students and reference desk staff not only in the repertory of sources they should be familiar with but in how those sources speak to the processes of reference service and the kinds of work that users are doing.

Now that it is on the Web, the Guide can also respond to one of its longest-standing criticisms, namely, that it is out of date by the time of publication. On the Web, everything is forever beta, which means that the editorial team will be constantly revising the Guide's narrative and bibliographic content and even organization. Readers who compare this new edition with the 11th will note that some categories are shorter than the Guide's were in the past. This reduction is a tribute to the aggregation of reference sources into larger units published on the Web and to reduced production of printed bibliographies as well as to a thorough review of the legacy content by contributors.

Readers will also find that the Guide has gone a bit more global as we have been able to add entries, for example, in the Bibliography category for a range of online library and national bibliography sites. As the Guide develops over the next few years, the representation of international publications made possible by the Web will globalize the Guide even more, and we may even look forward to the day when the Guide can take on international contributors who would create specialized content for given countries and regions.

With the list-making and user notes features of this new edition, we hope to institutionalize the important role that the reference community has played in helping the editorial team think about the design and content of the new edition. Robert Balay told me that, except for the occasional publisher, he did not hear from users about the Guide's content. Whatever the reasons for that silence, this new edition hopes to harness the energy of the reference community in the ongoing development of the Guide by inviting interaction and discussion.

The Guide's interactive features for lists and notes afford possibilities for LIS reference-course exercises, such reference department activities as collection weeding, and reference-desk training. The ability to export records will make the compilation of local instructional materials and subject portals easier. We also hope that librarians will use the notes feature to advise each other and the editorial team about the qualities and usefulness of sources, the relationships among sources, sources that should be considered as candidates for entry, revisions to the browsing taxonomy, and topics that should be covered or dropped.

The staff of the American Library Association (ALA) Publishing Department and the many librarians who have contributed their time and their knowledge of the reference literature to the compilation of this new edition of the Guide hope that librarians, library educators, students, and publishers, as well as library users, will find the advice we give useful in their work. We also hope that you will help us, through this website, to build the community of those who are reconfiguring the traditions of reference in the new information environment.

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