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E-books are on the minds of publishers, authors, and readers these days. And they should be on the minds of librarians as well. As with any new format for materials, there are challenges and issues that libraries face in adding e-books to their collections. Some libraries are already invested in the process, licensing e-book collections from vendors and even circulating preloaded e-book readers to users. Other institutions are waiting to see how the market shakes out and whether a platform neutral e-book format will make it possible for libraries to support any e-book user, regardless of whether they use a Kindle, a Nook, an iPad, a Sony Reader, or one of the other myriad readers out there. Beyond the collection and technological issues, e-book readers also offer readers’ advisors some new challenges in working with users. Any time a new format is introduced in libraries, we need to look at how that format affects the reader’s approach to the material. In the following piece, Katie Dunneback gives an overview of e-books and readers’ advisory that is a useful opening of the discussion of how we incorporate e-books into our practice as readers advisors. Dunneback is Consultant with East Central Library Services in Bettendorf, Iowa, where she is one of the lead providers of readers’ advisory continuing education. She has presented programs on e-books and RA/library issues for Library Journal’s E-book Summit, “eBooks: Libraries at the Tipping Point”; the 2011 Iowa Small Library Online Conference; and the 2011 Tools of Change Conference. Dunneback is coauthor of the Everything Romance chapter in Integrated Advisory Service: Breaking Through the Book Boundary to Better Serve Library Users. She is a member of the Iowa Center for the Book Advisory Board and was a member of the inaugural The Reading List Council in 2007.—Editor

From the first e-text keyed in to a computer file using plain vanilla ASCII by Michael Hart at the University of Illinois in 1971 (it was the Declaration of Independence ), the usage and development of e-books have grown by leaps and bounds.¹ As the speed of progress with regard to e-book technology is also ever increasing, this article will focus on an overview of considerations for technology, collection development and circulation issues, and providing advisory services for e-books in libraries. E-books have been freed from the Pandora’s box in the library world. We cannot stuff them back in and must figure out how to deal with the issues surrounding them.

Technical Issues

The first point of business to understand is that e-books do not enjoy the same sort of protections under copyright law as physical books do. The First Sale Doctrine is the exception to copyright law that allows for the transfer and disposal of a lawfully acquired and tangible copy of a work.² This is the section of copyright law that allows for libraries to operate in a lawful manner. In Complete Copyright, Carrie Russell notes that with the passage of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) of 1998, one of the unresolved issues was the “creation of a ‘digital first sale doctrine.’” Digital copies appear to still be subject to the First Sale Doctrine as long as they are tied to a tangible medium such as a CD or DVD.³

With intangible digital copies, you have lost the right to dispose of it as you wish (other than outright deleting it) and are in effect licensing access to a file. To control the access according to the license, publishers assign what is known as digital rights management (DRM) to files. DMCA essentially bars libraries from purchasing electronic copies of books themselves, setting up a file server, and distributing the files to their patrons as they see fit without the content creator’s explicit consent on each transaction. It could be done if your library wanted to set itself up as a direct distributor of a publisher’s titles rather than going through a vendor, but as you are still only licensing access, a library would have to invest significant money and manpower in developing a robust system that would appease content providers who insist on the presence of DRM. In this time of decreasing budgets and increased demand of library services, each institution must determine where they will get the most bang for their buck. Currently, I am unaware of any library dealing directly with publishers as direct distributor.

If you do decide to go with a commercial distributor or invest in the development of a distribution system of your own, file formats should be your number one consideration. Project Gutenberg continues to code their books as plain vanilla ASCII as “99% of the hardware and software a person is likely to run into can read and search these files.”⁴ In September 2007, the EPUB format was adopted by the International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF) as the standard format for digital publications.⁵ Publishers and distributors use many other formats, some of which are proprietary in nature. Many publishers, as already mentioned, also use DRM to restrict unauthorized access to the files. DRM code exists separately from file format code, but they are sometimes used in conjunction with each other to control access to e-book files, such as with Amazon’s Kindle files. In order to access a file that has been encoded with DRM, users need to have access to the key to unlock it. As most publishers license Adobe’s DRM code, this means users will need to have an Adobe account tied to the device they are using to access the file. Anonymous authorization is available, but the file cannot then be transferred to another device. The same is true for Amazon’s proprietary DRM. It is possible for multiple copies of an e-book to have the same filetype (.epub) but different DRM schemes, thereby forcing a user to need access to multiple programs to unlock each copy of the file.⁶ If an EPUB format book is encoded with DRM, it is no longer considered the open version of the format.

And with that, we come to one of the cruxes of the discussion: e-book readers. You need to factor it into your readers’ advisory interview. If your library offers an e-book service, can the reader the patron will be using access those books? Almost any computerized device these days has the capability of being an e-book reader if it has the right software installed. Computers can be e-book readers and probably are the most versatile devices when it comes to file formats. The drawback is most people don’t want to do their leisure reading on a computer, especially if they spend most of their day working at a computer. E-ink technology devices like the Amazon Kindle, Sony Reader, and Barnes and Noble Nook, to name the three most popular as of this writing, provide the most book-like reading experience. However, the Amazon Kindle proprietary DRM code is not currently compatible with the systems of e-book providers for libraries. An additional concern about the e-ink technology available in the United States is that it currently only reproduces images and text in black and white. Illustrated content, like graphic novels, is less successful on e-ink readers. This is where LCD based systems like the iPad, iPod Touch, and nookColor excel. In November 2010, the New York Times reported on the announcement of color e-ink technology by a Chinese company, Hanvon.⁷ I would safely speculate on the arrival of color e-ink technology in the North American market in the next two years, which will broaden the appeal of e-ink e-book readers. As it is in 2010, we have seen the price threshold of $100 for a dedicated e-book reader broken—by $1, but broken nonetheless—with the Aluratek Libre. As the price barrier lowers, libraries will likely see an increasing number of e-book adopters. These will include tech-savvy younger users as well as those older users with sight issues who may appreciate the ability to resize text.

Collection Development and Circulation

Collection development of any sort is dependent upon awareness. If we are to develop effective and useful collections for our patrons, we must be aware what titles are out there. There are a number of ways to accomplish this in the e-book world. Many traditionally published popular titles are also being released as e-books these days, but it is important to be aware of any that may have a delayed digital release. Library Journal’s Barbara Hoffert has begun to include e-book ISBN’s in her Prepub Alerts.⁸ The USA Today best-seller list includes notations for e-books for those titles where the e-book format was the most-purchased format.⁹ On November 10, 2010, the New York Times announced it will be compiling a best-seller list for e-books.¹⁰ Obviously, e-books have become entrenched in the public consciousness. What about the books which may not make the best-seller lists? The “midlist” authors? For books where a print edition exists, we can turn to standard review outlets such as Publishers Weekly and Library Journal. But what about those which do not have a print edition? Library Journal is exploring the possibilities of expanding their reviews to include digital-first or digital-only titles.¹¹ Outside of the traditional broad coverage review outlets, librarians should also pay attention to genre-specific outlets like RT Book Reviews which include reviews of digital-first and digital-only titles. For previews of books, librarians are one of the target audiences for the NetGalley service where publishers make digital advance reader copies available for review. Book bloggers are another rising outlet for publisher publicity efforts, and these readers tend to read broadly in terms of both content as well as format.

In personal conversations with Library Journal’s Heather McCormack, we have discussed the issue of titles in digital format that are not available for library distribution. This is a significant concern. A number of rising star authors currently have some titles only available in a digital format and are not necessarily available for distribution to libraries. Examples of this are specialty and independent presses whose business model is that of digital-first/-only (DF/DO) publishing. This is a point where libraries need to become involved in conversations with publishers to work out mutually beneficial solutions. A number of DF/DO publishers are making their books available to libraries through third-party vendors. As the economy and the publishing market change, I believe we will be seeing more and more DF/DO publishers crop up and established publishers move to a DF/DO business model either fully themselves or by spinning off new divisions and imprints. One example of this is Carina Press, a division of Harlequin Enterprises, Ltd. Launched in June 2010, Carina Press has made a splash in the romance genre with authors already popular in the e-book market as well as authors with print publishing histories. They have recently begun republishing Jennifer Greene’s early titles, so if you are looking for replacement copies, you are going to have to go digital. A more prominent example of an author going digital is Stephen King with his short story, “UR,” currently only available through Amazon. With the proselytizing of the advantages of digital self-publishing by author J. A. Konrath, as well as similar ventures by popular marketing entrepreneur and public speaker Seth Godin, we may be seeing more and more popular authors bypassing traditional publishing ventures for some, if not all, of their future work.

Circulation of popular titles is always an issue. E-books are generally treated the same as physical copies of books when it comes to circulation. If the library owns one “copy” of the digital format, it can only be lent out to one person at a time under the model currently employed by most distributors. This is the scheme that DRM facilitates. There are multiple lending schemes libraries have employed to facilitate access to digital format titles. One of the more popular schemes is to engage a vendor like NetLibrary or Overdrive to provide content while the patrons provide the devices on which to read the content. Some libraries have chosen to provide devices onto which they load the titles. For libraries employing this scheme and using devices that can access a store, patron-driven acquisition is sometimes also deployed. Putting the power of acquisition in the hands of patrons can be at once empowering and also in need of careful management. There are a couple of drawbacks to the scheme of providing the devices themselves. The first is that the license for the operating software may prohibit usage by libraries. This is a concern to discuss with your institution’s legal counsel when considering this option. The other is how many devices the library will own in proportion to the number of titles. If all of the devices are out, that can make the entire digital collection unavailable to the remainder of your patrons even if the titles are not in use by the person currently in possession of the device. The benefit to the library lending out e-book readers is for the section of their population who do not have Internet access or a personal computer at home, let alone an e-book reader. Ultimately, there is no one perfect solution to this dilemma.

Advisory Services

Books are the brand of libraries. All formats of books. All. Formats. With the need of an intermediary technology on which to read the story, e-books present a fascinating area of advisory for librarians. We need to be able to be advisors of technology in addition to content. As we have seen with audiobooks, the format you use to access the story expands the appeal factors of the content. Library patrons come to us for help in figuring out the best possible reading experience. With audiobooks, as long as the patron had a device that played the physical format, it didn’t matter what the device was because the device itself contributed minimally to the reading experience. With e-book readers, this is not the case.

Display options are the most easily understood component in determining appeal factors in regards to e-book readers. Readers utilizing e-ink technology can achieve an immersive experience similar to reading a print book. Keep in mind that the quality of the resolution will vary from brand to brand and model to model as new generations are released. Also you need to be aware of any additional technology layers, such as touch screens, added to the viewing panel. While the addition of a touch screen will degrade resolution, it will allow for the user to move pages by using their fingers as opposed to buttons, which may aid in the immersive experience. The size and weight of the device are also important. Some readers prefer hardbacks to paperbacks and vice versa. The various devices can be correlated to holding a book of either size. This brings up another factor, as some people want to feel like they are still holding a book: what accessories, namely covers, are available for the devices? Library patrons’ physical restrictions contribute to a satisfactory reading experience that can be helped or hindered by the reading devices available. Does the patron need to have access to very large type or text-to-speech capability? What if the patron has arthritis and can’t hold a heavy device for an extended period of time? This convergence of readers’ advisory and consumer information reference requires excellence in the skill set common to reference services and readers’ advisory services.

As the device used to access the digital format contributes appeal factors to the reading experience, so does the digital format alter some appeal factors considered inherent to the book reading experience. The impact of digitization of books and stories on appeal factors is most prominently felt with pacing. In her discussion of appeal factors at the “eBooks: Libraries at the Tipping Point” online conference, Neal Wyatt noted the lack of physical indication as to how much left you have of the book to read. Some e-book reading devices and software programs are able to compensate with indications of page numbers; however, this is not the same as the sensation of less than fifty pages in your right hand and you must absolutely finish the book tonight even if it’s 2:00 a.m. and you must be up at 5:00 a.m. for a critical-to-your-career meeting. The reader will need to rely entirely on narrative drive to feel the pace of the story. Pacing is also affected by how much text is visible on the screen, so the larger the text, the less there is to indicate how quickly the story is moving. As the layout of the page changes, this can also affect the tone of the story. When you see large blocks of texts on the page, this can indicate a description rich story, possibly intended to be a leisurely read, or an indulgence of rich details. Short paragraphs with lots of dialogue can mean snappy or quick-witted characters. If the visual cues are not there, will the reader tire of the story more quickly? Richly detailed books may also not be the best type of book to read on an e-book reader, especially if the reader is one who likes to do what I call the fan and scan to check for previously revealed information. It is not easy to jump between points in the book if you do not know exactly where you are going. Re-readers, particularly if they only read certain parts of the book, may find this lack of ability frustrating. There is something to be said for the spine breaks occurring where the good parts of the book are.

The readers’ advisory interview must and will evolve as e-books become more and more entrenched in library collections. Readers’ advisory trainers should begin including discussions of the technology in continuing education sessions even if their library does not currently offer e-books as part of the collection. Culturally, the traditional printed codex has become the invisible technology with regard to reading. As future generations grow up with technology on which to read e-books, and conversely as that technology “grows up,” we may find other devices that are able to occupy the same invisible space as the codex. We may even find the art of storytelling evolving to adapt to the advantages provided by digital technology, kindred the branching off of printed storytelling from oral storytelling. This emerging arena is where I think we will truly see the next phase of readers’ advisory services develop.

Conclusion

With the entry into digital collections, a library must consider many implications. In some ways, libraries have already dealt with issues of interlibrary loan functions with the advent of online journal collections. We must take this a step further when dealing with leisure reading collection. A great majority of library patrons have been conditioned to the availability of most any book they are in want of through resource sharing efforts. With the cost of setting up a digital collection as well as the cost of the materials themselves, small- and medium-sized libraries may find it more cost effective to create or join a larger consortium to provide a wide range of digital content.

At the conclusion of my portion of the panel discussion on e-books and readers’ advisory at the “eBooks: Libraries at the Tipping Point” online conference, I included a slide titled “Ponderings” with two questions: “How do we serve our patrons on the ‘wrong’ side of the digital divide if the midlist goes digital and copyright/DRM does not change?” and “What are the implications of recommending titles we cannot provide as an institution?” I believe we need to address these questions as a profession as we move further into the world of e-books. A concrete solution to them isn’t likely, but knowing where we stand will allow us to move forward in conversations with publishers and content providers, and we need to have those conversations. We should invite publishing professionals to the conversations we have in our spaces and take the time to participate in the conversations happening in their spaces.

The opportunity to have an impact on the future of publishing is in our hands, and we cannot let it slip through our fingers. We are experts in connecting readers to books. Those skills will carry us into the future no matter the format. Adaptation is the hallmark of successful evolution. It’s not always easy, but with adaptation, we will be opening ourselves and our patrons to an expanded world of leisure reading opportunities.

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The path to becoming an academic library dean is not prescriptive nor necessarily linear. Each ascends to that post in a unique way; all come from different backgrounds and experiences. For some, such a position is a goal from the start of their careers; they lay careful groundwork and make strategic choices to chart their course. In other cases, the decision to move into management evolves as the career unfolds, making it seem logical or even necessary to consider moving on to an administrative opportunity. For many, taking on a senior leadership role is more accidental or incidental—being in the right place at the right time; being recognized for past work and tapped from within; being asked to step in to fill a need in the organization. In the following article, Mark Stover shares an account of his particular progression, with observations recalled along the way. He cites the importance of recognizing opportunities, cultivating support, and having a good mentor. Like many, Stover came to senior management from the public services side of the house and includes an interesting comparison and contrast between being a reference librarian and a dean.—Editor

As a reference librarian for the first twenty years of my career, I never thought that I would become a library dean by 2011. My primary objective was to work directly with students, either one-to-one at the reference desk, one-to-one in research consultations, or one-to-many in library instruction. Information literacy for the students was my goal, and I did not (and perhaps could not) see myself as an administrator for a large university library. It seemed unrelated to and disconnected from the “real world “ of librarianship, which to me meant working in close proximity to students who needed my help and who gave me that wonderful sense of immediate gratification when they thanked me, sometimes profusely, for the assistance that I provided.

All of that started to change in early 2005 when I was approached by the associate dean of the library at San Diego State University to take over the reins of the reference division from the retiring head of reference. My first reaction was to turn down the offer. After all, I enjoyed what I was doing, had been promoted to the highest rank that library faculty could achieve at my university, and did not sense the “calling” of library leadership. Perhaps more importantly, I wasn’t sure I could do the job. My predecessor once told me that supervising fifteen or so unionized and tenured librarians would be akin to herding cats. In addition, there were some thorny personnel issues that had gone unresolved for years. On the other hand, who could blame those around me for thinking that I might be interested in management? I had worked as the library director of a very small academic institution for a few years and was none the worse for it. I had earned a doctorate in the 1990s, which does communicate to some people that a librarian might have aspirations beyond the reference desk. I had even published articles and given presentations on various facets of running a library, including a book entitled Leading the Wired Organization.

I relented and accepted the position of head of reference in 2005. The transition was an easy one to make, given that I had the support of my colleagues, encouragement from library administration, and a job description that, along with serving as head of reference, included much of my former work in reference, instruction, and collection development. Being head of reference, at least at my university, involved a fair amount of logistical juggling and running meetings but not much in the way of long-term strategic planning. I worked with campus human resources, the staff employees’ union, and other library managers to address the staff problems that existed. However, I found that there were few hard decisions to make, since most questions of substance could be answered through group consensus at reference meetings or through finessing the problem in smaller subcommittees. During this time I began to serve on the dean’s advisory council, along with other heads of departments in the library. I enjoyed my two year stint as head of reference, and I learned a great deal, but in the deep recesses of my mind I realized that I might be ready for more challenges in the near future.

Those challenges came in 2007 when the dean of the library asked me to become the Assistant University Librarian for Research Services, a new position that was a hodge-podge of responsibilities including government grants, special collections, collection development, and facilities. Along with these duties, the position required that I leave my faculty position and join the upper echelons of management. While I would have retreat rights to the librarian ranks, I would need to leave the collective bargaining comfort of the faculty union and serve at the pleasure of the university president. In other words, as many of my colleagues jokingly reminded me, I would be going over to the dark side.

While some of the same fears and insecurities about management still plagued me, I chose to accept the offer and move into the new AUL role. I was sorry to leave the collegiality of the library faculty but was excited about learning the mysteries of library administration. While some academic library administrators continue to work a few hours at the reference desk, I decided not to do so based on advice from several mentors. There are advantages and disadvantages to an administrator “working in the trenches,” but with a busy schedule and increased responsibilities, it seemed prudent to withdraw from my previous librarian duties. There was another reason, too. In my library there is a sharp distinction between faculty and administration. Part of this chasm stems from contractual issues, but much of it comes from a long tradition of mistrust and skepticism on both sides. Thus, while some librarians were disappointed that I chose not to work any hours on the reference desk, others were resentful when I would occasionally give my opinion on collection development decisions. Divisions like this are difficult to heal, but time and good faith efforts do tend to bring about incremental increases in trust among members of a divided community. While working at the reference desk as an administrator might have been one way to build this trust, I chose to find other ways to repair the breach.

After one year as an AUL, my dean unexpectedly left to take another position. As often happens in these situations, the associate dean was promoted to interim dean, and I was thrust into the job of interim associate dean, where I remained for over two years. Given that I had a positive working relationship with the new interim dean, and given that I was hoping for other challenges and responsibilities, I welcomed the new role. I continued to perform some of the same jobs I had in the AUL position, but I was also given a multitude of new responsibilities. These included many more direct and indirect reports, oversight of the library faculty tenure and promotion process, and even some fundraising assignments. When I was hired as an AUL, strategic planning was placed in my portfolio, and this mandate continued to be a priority.

One of the most challenging facets of my tenure as interim associate dean was managing change. As a reference librarian, and even as head of reference, I tended to view long-term change as something that evolved on its own and incrementally. Short-term change was something that librarians could more easily control, but long-term change was unpredictable. As a library administrator, I still think that there is no crystal ball and that speculative predictions of the future library will be inexact at best. However, I also came to believe that long range planning is vital to the library enterprise. Perhaps the most difficult part of the strategic planning process is convincing others that paradigmatic change for libraries in the twenty-first century is absolutely necessary, and that if we do not plan for it, it will happen anyway, and it will occur with more negative consequences than we might imagine. Persuasion is a slippery tool. If we try to win over others with overthe-top rhetoric and bombast, we run the risk of overstating our case. If we unilaterally dictate change (“my way or the highway”), we lose goodwill and trust from those who will need to implement the change, and we ultimately will fail in our attempts to effect successful transformation. If we try to persuade through sly remarks and coy conversations, we appear to be Machiavellian, and we again lose credibility. While I believe that subtlety has its place, the most powerful tool in my bag of persuasive tricks is sustained, straightforward conversations (preferably over coffee) with key stakeholders. These informal discussions will build bonds of trust that will later pay off when emotional issues arise over painful changes that ultimately must take place. This is not to say that there is no place for town hall meetings, teams, committees, or small groups, for these too are vital components of bringing about progress. However, I would posit that the cornerstone of persuading library staff of the necessity for transformative change is the one-on-one conversation in an informal setting.

In late 2010, I became interim dean, and my purview of responsibilities changed yet again. Thankfully I had been mentored well by the two previous deans, so the inscrutable nature of library administration was less mystifying than it might otherwise have been. A bigger office, a larger salary, and the power to make independent decisions—were these amenities worth the stress that came with the new position? Each new dean or director must answer that question for himself or herself, but for me, especially since my own journey has been so steep and fast, the jury is still out. Still, I can say that my passion for leadership has only grown during my path from reference librarian to library dean. It certainly helped to have supportive co-laborers, not only in my own institution but also in my modest network of professional colleagues cobbled together over the years. It also eased my transition to have recent experiences on the front lines of reference work. There is nothing better for an administrator than to remember how it feels to be in the sensible shoes of a reference librarian. On the other hand, there is nothing worse than having a manager who lacks empathy due to his or her distance from or lack of experience with day-to-day library work.

I’ll end this column by sketching out some comparisons and contrasts between my work as a reference librarian and my work as a dean. In terms of similarities, both the librarian and the dean need people skills, even though the reasons these skills are vital vary greatly from one position to the other. Both the reference librarian and the library dean must deal well with change, the librarian from a tactical, day-today vantage point and the dean from a strategic, long-range perspective. Both the librarian and the dean must know how to communicate well. Navigating the reference interview, which is good communication at its essence is a critical skill whether at the reference desk, online during the reference chat, or in the librarian’s office during a research consultation.

The refined communication skills of a reference librarian have served me well as an administrator, whether I was clarifying the expectations of the provost, cultivating a donor, or sharing my strategic vision with library staff.

But there are differences as well between a reference librarian and a library director. Some are obvious, like fund-raising, public relations, and interactions with campus executives. The typical reference librarian generally doesn’t have to work with donors or the university president, especially on a large campus. Some differences, however, are more subtle. For example, most front line librarians rarely think about the strategic aspects of long-range planning, and, if I may generalize from my own experience, they often have little respect for such processes. As a young reference librarian, and even later as a more experienced head of reference, I was concerned about the tactical, day-to-day work of the reference desk, learning new database interfaces and keeping abreast of the latest reference sources so that I could better serve students. I didn’t have time to worry about what the library might look like in ten years, much less plan for different scenarios. I was too busy keeping my head above water. As a library administrator, my role has been reversed. Strategic planning is a crucial part of my job, and much as I might wish otherwise, I must delegate tactical implementation to others.

In the final analysis, the work of a reference librarian prepared me well for library management. Some requirements for administrators demand on-the-job training and cannot be acquired at the reference desk. On the other hand, multiple competencies, including clear communication and interpersonal skills, are all transferable from one domain to the other. If my case is any indication, reference librarians who seek to become library leaders will encounter some challenges but will also find many opportunities for advancement.

Correspondence concerning this column should be addressed to Marianne Ryan, Associate University Librarian for Public Services, Northwestern University Library, 1970 Campus Drive, Evanston, IL 60208; e-mail: marianneryan@northwestern.edu.

Mark Stover is Interim Dean, Library and Information Access, San Diego State University. On July 1, 2011 he will become Dean of the Library at California State University, Northridge.

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Many librarians have been asked to take on additional responsibilities during these tight economic times. In this column, Maureen Perry writes about what she learned from her year as a hybrid librarian, splitting her time between reference and special collections. She found this assignment enjoyable, and her essay reminds us of the value of job exchanges and other job enrichment opportunities.—Editor

Many reference librarians find themselves taking on duties outside of their respective skill sets. What follows is the story of my academic year in special collections. I hope that the insights I have gained there will inspire others to make the most of the learning opportunities that these assignments can present. Though the term archive has a specific meaning, I shall use the terms archive/archival and special collections interchangeably for the sake of brevity.

An Unexpected Opportunity

The University of Southern Maine’s (USM) Lewiston-Auburn College houses an extensive collection of items related to local and regional Franco-American life.¹ When it lost a coordinator, I was asked to help maintain the Franco-American Collection (FAC) until a new coordinator could be hired. Though not an archivist by training, I do serve on the collection’s board of directors and as liaison to the college’s arts and humanities division, which includes French North American studies. The college’s dean saw the collection’s potential as a community resource.

I spent the 2009–10 academic year in two worlds: special collections and regular reference. Although I had no formalized training in the area, I was able to put together my own training plan. From the head of special collections at our Portland campus I learned about the appropriate forms; other local special collections librarians showed me some preservation basics.² The curator of the college’s Atrium Art Gallery helped me design and mount window displays.³

Special Collections Reference

The most rewarding part of the experience was working with the patrons. Though I still worked with patrons daily in my regular post, I found that reference work in the FAC differed from my regular work in two major ways, which only served to help further develop my reference skills.

Firstly, archival reference questions can be time intensive.⁴ As O’Donnell points out, seemingly basic factual questions can often involve deep contextual research. This concept can apply to regular reference questions but applies especially well to archival questions.⁵ As a Franco-American and a Lewiston native, I often found myself drawing upon my background, as well as turning to local experts (including my own mother), in helping patrons with their research.

One patron was researching local parochial schools, and since my mother had attended parochial school and later served as business manager for one of the parishes, I drew upon that expertise.⁶ Now in my regular reference consultations I more frequently mention the value of using subject experts as information sources.

Secondly, special collections differ from regular collections in their arrangement of materials. Generally the materials in a special collection are not shelved according to a call number order.⁷ The FAC’s items are arranged first by geographic region (with a particular emphasis on Lewiston) and then by general subject. Biographical materials have their own section and are filed alphabetically by biographee. A finding aid describes what is located where. While this point may seem obvious, the quality of the finding aid did impact the reference service I was able to provide, especially since patrons often came to see particular items.

Back in my regular role I now have more appreciation for good cataloging and description. When I send notifications about new books in my liaison areas, I pay closer attention in case I catch a discrepancy in the catalog record. I recommend items to my patrons, and our catalogers enable us to find these items. When I create subject guides, I am now more mindful of what wording would best help my patrons find what they need.

I have gained a special appreciation for the role of outreach. The better you know your collection, the better you can promote it. Promoting the collection attracts donors— whose gifts impact the collection’s inventory. Likewise, knowing my regular collection helps me better evaluate potential donations, weeds, and purchases. In addition, I can recommend FAC items when they fit a general reference question.

Cross-Training Truths

My cross-training experiences reflect corresponding truths of cross-training in general. Cross-training is an investment in time, and DeZelar-Tiedman mentions the learning curve involved in most cross-training.⁸ My learning curve involved the aforementioned preservation basics, archival record-keeping, etc. as well as making time for the in-depth contextual research my reference questions entailed.

Cross-training is also a study in interrelationships. It allows the trainee to better understand the interdependence of different library functions.⁹ This idea reflects my experience in special collections, from finding items to using them to promoting them.

Tips for Reference Librarians

Cross-training scenarios can differ considerably. Here are some tips that can apply to most scenarios:

Ask for Help

A cross-training experience can be a learning experience, but you can—and should—ask for help when needed. As I mentioned above, I had a great deal of help in areas where I had less experience or talent.

Spot the Connections

Since cross-training highlights the interrelatedness of library functions, make use of the concrete opportunities these connections present. For example, I was helping a patron with a question on Franco-American cooking. I found a cookbook that later filled a gap in a window display I was designing. These serendipitous moments do take place: don’t dismiss the ways in which one duty can inform another.

Seek Learning Moments

I realize that many cross-training assignments are not as pleasant as mine has been. Even I sometimes felt torn between the two worlds. However, most job experiences can be learning experiences. Keep your eyes and ears open for insights that you can bring back to your regular duties. Doing so may help you make the best of your situation.

Document, Document, Document

From the beginning of my assignment I kept a log of my release time activities. This made my supervisor and the dean aware of the many things that needed doing. It also helped during my performance evaluation. Even now it helps me inform the new coordinator of priorities I have identified. For most people, good documentation can help with performance appraisals and with finding the learning opportunities as mentioned above.

The documentation can take forms other than text. For example, I have maintained the link to an online mini-exhibit I created.¹⁰ This link can serve as a record of my learning and as an outreach tool.

What Happens Next

The College has hired a new coordinator for the FAC. I still serve on the FAC’s board of directors. Now the opinions I offer at board meetings are better informed by experience. By incorporating its primary sources into my instruction, I can still promote the FAC. Now I am working on ways to include FAC holdings in courses outside of French North American studies.

My supervisor followed Margaret Myers’s definition of staffing: “all methods of matching skills available with the tasks to be performed.”¹¹ I had the good fortune of still working within my comfort zone (the reference duties) and within an interest area (Franco-American studies). All the same, the assignment filled a temporary need for the college and made me a better reference librarian as well.

Many institutions face lean staffing situations in these tough budgetary times. If sharing my story can help others in their added duties, then my experience has been doubly worthwhile.¹²

Correspondence concerning this column should be addressed to Diane Zabel, Schreyer Business Library, The Pennsylvania State University, 309 Paterno Library, University Park, PA 16802; e-mail: dxz2@psu.edu.

Maureen Perry is Reference and Instructional Services Librarian, University of Southern Maine Lewiston-Auburn College, Lewiston, Maine.

References and Notes

1. Franco-American Collection, University of Southern Maine, University of Southern Maine’s Franco-American Collection/Collection Franco-Américaine (accessed Oct. 15, 2010).
2. I thank Susie Bock, Head of Special Collections, University of Southern Maine Libraries. I also thank the staff of the Edmund S. Muskie Archives, Bates College (Lewiston, Maine).
3. Additionally I thank Robyn Holman, Curator of the Atrium Art Gallery, USM Lewiston-Auburn College.
4. Frances O’Donnell, “Reference Service in an Academic Archives,” Journal of Academic Librarianship 26, no. 2 (2000): 113.
5. Ibid.
6. Very special thanks go to my mother, Pauline Perry, for her constant support.
7. Elizabeth Yakel, “Information Literacy for Primary Sources: Creating a New Paradigm for Archival Researcher Education,” OCLC Systems & Services: International Digital Library Perspectives 20, no. 2 (2004): 61–62.
8. Christine DeZelar-Tiedman, “A Perfect Fit: Tailoring Library Positions to Match Individual Skills,” Journal of Library Administration 29, no. 2 (1999): 34.
9. Marilyn Myers, “Blurring the Lines: Mingling Technical and Public Services Responsibilities: Report of the ALCTS Role of the Professional in Academic Technical Services Discussion Group Meeting. American Library Association Midwinter Meeting, Washington, D.C., February 1997,” Technical Services Quarterly 15, no. 4 (1998): 69.
10. Maureen Perry, Festival History in Flyers (accessed Oct. 15, 2010).
11. Margaret Myers, “Staffing Patterns,” in Personnel Administration in Libraries, eds. Sheila Creth and Fredick Duda (New York: Neal-Schuman, 1989), 40–63.
12. I thank Barb Mann, Assistant Director and Public Services/Instruction/Information Literacy Librarian at the University of Maryland University College, for her editorial assistance.

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The Reading List annually recognizes the best books in eight genres: adrenaline (which includes suspense, thriller, and adventure), fantasy, historical fiction, horror, mystery, romance, science fiction, and women’s fiction. This year’s list includes novels that will please die-hard fans as well as introduce new readers to the pleasure of genre fiction. The winning titles were selected by the Reading List Council.

Adrenaline

Olen Steinhauer. The Nearest Exit. Minotaur, 2010. $25.99 (ISBN 978-031-262287-9).

Burned-out spy Milo Weaver confronts layers of deceit as his career collides with his desire to reclaim his family and his humanity. The labyrinthine intrigues enhance a building atmosphere of paranoia in this dark and emotionally-charged classic espionage thriller.

Readers may also enjoy Graham Greene’s The Quiet American, John Le Carre’s The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, and Alan Furst’s Night Soldiers.

Fantasy

Guy Gavriel Kay. Under Heaven. ROC, 2010. $26.95 (ISBN 978-0451463302).

Haunted by the ghosts of fallen warriors, Shen Tai is forced into the political machinations of the Emperor’s court when he receives a rare and valuable gift. Lyrical language and complex characterization draw readers into this elaborately unfolding epic set in a fantasy world that richly reimages eighth century Tang Dynasty China.

Readers may also enjoy Jo Graham’s Black Ships, Conn Iggulden’s Genghis: Birth of an Empire, and Vonda N. McIntyre’s The Moon and the Sun.

Historical Fiction

Julie Orringer. The Invisible Bridge. Knopf, 2010. $26.95 (ISBN 978-1-4000-4116-9).

In this sweeping yet intimate portrait of a Hungarian Jewish family in Europe, two lovers become enmeshed in the turmoil of the Holocaust. With gorgeous prose and an exquisite evocation of Paris and Budapest, Orringer writes movingly of their strength and the bittersweet power of hope and love.

Readers may also enjoy Louis De Bernieres’s Corelli’s Mandolin, Janice Y. K. Lee’s The Piano Teacher, and Mary Doria Russell’s A Thread of Grace.

Horror

Stephen M. Irwin. The Dead Path. Doubleday, 2010. $25.95 (ISBN 978-0-385-53343-0).

Guilt ridden Nicholas Close retreats to his family home in Australia after the tragic death of his wife, only to encounter an ancient malevolence lurking in the nearby woods. Childhood nightmares and fairytale motifs combine in this emotionally powerful tale of implacable evil. Arachnophobes beware!

Readers may also enjoy Stephen King’s It, Raymond Feist’s Faerie Tale: A Novel of Terror and Fantasy, and Brian Keene’s Dark Hollow.

Mystery

Louise Penny. Bury Your Dead. Minotaur, 2010. $24.99 (ISBN 978-0-312-37704-5).

Troubled by past mistakes, Chief Inspector Gamache, in his sixth outing, retreats to snowy and insular Quebec City, where he becomes embroiled in intertwining investigations of both old and new. Penny expertly delivers a layered story that is haunting, moody, and exquisitely drawn.

Readers may also enjoy Charles Todd’s A Test of Wills, Erin Hart’s Haunted Ground, and Julia Spencer-Fleming’s In the Bleak Midwinter.

Romance

Mary Balogh. A Matter of Class. Vanguard Press, 2009. $15.95 (ISBN 978-1-59315-554-4).

A lady is ruined. A merchant’s son is trapped. Class differences loom large in this charming and playful take on the arranged marriage. Balogh’s regency gem, where nothing is quite as it seems, is filled with affection and wit.

Readers may also enjoy Georgette Heyer’s Faro’s Daughter, Rose Lerner’s In for a Penny, and Julia Quinn’s The Viscount Who Loved Me.

Science Fiction

Ian McDonald. The Dervish House. Pyr, 2010. $26 (ISBN 9781616142049).

A terrorist bomb sets off a chain of events that, over the next five days, entangles the lives of six characters. McDonald brilliantly imagines a world in which the ultramodern exists side-by-side with the ancient, and he blends science and mysticism to embody the contradiction that is Istanbul in 2027.

Readers may also enjoy William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition, George Alec Effinger’s When Gravity Fails, and Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl.

Women’s Fiction

Jo Ann Mapson. Solomon’s Oak. Bloomsbury, 2010. $25 (ISBN 978-1-60819-330-1).

Recently widowed Glory Solomon collects stray animals and damaged souls. Facing bankruptcy, she creates a new life catering themed weddings. This deeply felt yet unsentimental novel explores grief, healing, and second chances.

Readers may also enjoy Juliette Fay’s Shelter Me, Marsha Moyer’s The Second Coming of Lucy Hatch, and Katrina Kittle’s The Blessings of the Animals.

Reading List Council 2010–11 members: Jacqueline Sasaki, Ann Arbor District Library, chair; Alicia Ahlvers, Kansas City Public Library; Jennifer Baker, Seattle Public Library; Cheryl Bryan, Massachusetts Library System, Waltham; Craig Clark, formerly with Cuyahoga County Public Library; Kathleen Collins, University of Washington Libraries, Seattle; Megan McArdle, Berkeley Public Library; Joyce Saricks, Downers Grove, Illinois; Sharron Smith, Kitchener Public Library, vice-chair; Kimberly Wells, Denton Public Library; Neal Wyatt, Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond; and Alan Ziebarth, Chicago, Illinois.

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The Outstanding Reference Source list of titles identifies the most important reference publications for small- and medium-sized public and academic libraries published in a given year. The publication of this list began in 1958 and now also includes outstanding electronic resources. The titles were selected by the RUSA CODES Reference Sources Committee.

The Selections for Year 2011

The Oxford Companion to the Book. Ed. Michael F. Suarez, S.J. and H.R. Woudhuysen. 2 vols. Oxford, 2010. $325 (ISBN 978-0-19-860653-6).

Encyclopedia of Identity. Ed. Ronald L. Jackson II. 2 vols. Sage, 2010. $350 (ISBN 978-1-4129-5153-1).

Encyclopedia of Geography. Ed. Barney Warf. 6 vols. Sage, 2010. $895 (ISBN 978-1-4129-5697-0).

The Oxford Encyclopedia of Ancient Greece and Rome. Ed. Michael Gagarin. 7 vols. Oxford, 2010. $995 (ISBN 978-0-19517072-6).

The Encyclopedia of Religion in America. Ed. Charles H. Lippy and Peter W. Williams. 4 vols. CQ Press, 2010. $600 (ISBN 978-0-87289-580-5).

Off Broadway Musicals, 1910 –2007: Casts, Credits, Songs, Critical Reception and Performance Data of More Than 1,800 Shows.

Ed. Dan Dietz. 1 vol. McFarland, 2010. $295 (ISBN 978-07864-3399-5).

Encyclopedia of World Dress and Fashion. Ed. Joanne B. Eicher. 10 vols. Oxford, 2010. $1,995 (ISBN 978-0-19-537733-0).

Berg Fashion Library. Oxford, 2010.

Chronology of the Evolution-Creationism Controversy. Ed. Randy Moore et al. 1 vol. Greenwood, 2009. $85 (ISBN 978-031336-287-3).

The Oxford International Encyclopedia of Peace. Ed. Nigel Young. 4 vols. Oxford, 2010. $495 (ISBN 978-0-19-533468-5).

21st Century Economics A Reference Handbook. Ed. Rhona C. Free. 2 vols. Sage, 2010. $325 (ISBN 978-1-4129-6142-4).

Encyclopedia of Group Processes & Intergroup Relations. Ed. John M. Levine and Michael A. Hogg. 2 vols. Sage, 2010. $375. (ISBN 978-1-4129-4208-9).

Encyclopedia of Political Theory. Ed. Mark Bevir. 3 vols. Sage, 2010. $425 (ISBN 978-1-4129-5865-3).

RUSA CODES Reference Sources Committee 2010–11 members: Deborah Katz, Washington University Libraries, chair; Elinor Appel, North Seattle Community College; Anne-Marie Davis, University of Washington; Cynthia Dudenhöffer, Smiley Memorial Library, Fayette, Missouri; Chaunacey Dunklee, Fullerton Public Library, California; Curtis Ferree, Fairfield University; Patricia L. Gregory, Pius XII Memorial Library, St. Louis University; Danise G. Hoover, Hunter College Library; Stephen Marvin, West Chester University of Pennsylvania; Claire Murata, Shoreline Community College, Washington; and Patrick J. Wall, University City Public Library, Missouri.

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Since 1944, the Notable Books Council has annually selected a list of twenty-five very good, very readable, and at times very important fiction, nonfiction, and poetry books for the adult reader. Books may be selected because they possess exceptional literary merit, expand the horizons of human knowledge, make a specialized body of knowledge accessible to the nonspecialist, have the potential to contribute significantly to the solution of a contemporary problem, or present a unique concept.

Fiction

Rick Bass. Nashville Chrome. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. $24 (ISBN 978-0-547-31726-7).
This lovely account of pop trio The Browns reels you in as though the concept of rags to riches were brand new.

Emma Donoghue. Room: A Novel. Little, Brown. $24.99 (ISBN 978-0-316-09833-5).
Five-year-old Jack vividly narrates the story of his life confined in a room with his mother in this unsettling exploration of resilience and hope.

Jennifer Egan. A Visit from the Goon Squad. Knopf. $25.95 (ISBN 978-0-307-59283-5).
A 70s punk band becomes the touchstone for a motley crew who spin their interconnected stories over time and distance.

Tom Franklin. Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter. William Morrow. $24.99 (ISBN 978-0-06-059466-4).
Two men—one black, one white—must confront the secrets surrounding their childhood friendship following the disappearance of two girls in rural Mississippi.

Jonathan Franzen. Freedom. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. $28 (ISBN 978-0-374-15846-0).
This incisive portrait of the fractured Berglund brood captures the zeitgeist of contemporary America.

James Hynes. Next. Reagan Arthur. $23.99 (ISBN 978-0316-05192-7).
Welcome to the worst day of Kevin Quinn’s life as he battles the anxieties of the modern world in steamy Austin, Texas.

Chang-Rae Lee. The Surrendered. Riverhead. $26.95 (ISBN 978-1-59448-976-1).
The complex entangled lives of three people forever scarred by the Korean War are sympathetically portrayed in gorgeous prose.

Karl Marlantes. Matterhorn: A Novel of the Vietnam War. Atlantic Monthly Press. $24.95 (ISBN 978-0-8021-1928-5).
An ambitious and idealistic American marine faces the horror, heroism, futility, and pragmatism of war in this visceral portrayal of life in country.

David Mitchell. The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet: A Novel. Random House. $26 (ISBN 978-1-4000-6545-5).
A young clerk attempts to establish himself in the artificial and intense world of Dejima, the Dutch trading colony in 1800s Japan.

Paul Murray. Skippy Dies. Faber and Faber. $28 (ISBN 9780-86547-943-2).
Filled with warmth and humor, this coming-of-age novel set in a Dublin boys schools is a sprawling homage to adolescence, string theory, donuts, and unrequited love.

Tatjana Soli. The Lotus Eaters. St. Martin’s. $24.99 (ISBN 9780-312-61157-6).
The adrenaline high that danger offers infects photojournalist Helen Adams as she documents the war in Vietnam.

Brady Udall. The Lonely Polygamist: A Novel. Norton. $26.95 (ISBN 978-0-393-06262-5).
In this big-hearted novel, Golden Richards and his clan navigate their chaotic lives as each clamors to be noticed.

Nonfiction

Ron Chernow. Washington: A Life. Penguin. $40 (ISBN 9781594202667).
A landmark biography provides insights into the complexities of this founding father’s character, and brings him fully to life within the context of his times.

Edmund de Waal. The Hare with Amber Eyes: A Family’s Century of Art and Loss. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. $26 (ISBN 978-0374105976).
Blending history, biography, and art, this personal account elegantly traces the fate of a European Jewish family and their collection of 246 netsuke.

Barbara Demick. Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea. Spiegel & Grau. $26 (ISBN 978-0-385-52390-5).
Chronicling the experiences of six people, this powerful account draws back the curtain on the brutality of life under a totalitarian regime.

Notable Books

Ian Frazier. Travels in Siberia. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. $30 (ISBN 978-0374278724).
Stricken by Russia love, a writer sets out to experience all things Siberian and takes us along for the rollicking journey.

Oren Harman. The Price of Altruism: George Price and the Search for the Origins of Kindness. Norton. $27.95 (ISBN 9780-393-06778-1).
This moving work provides insight into the mind of a tormented genius attempting to understand an elusive aspect of human nature.

Daniel Okrent. Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition. Scribner. $30 (ISBN 978-0-7432-7702-0).
This intoxicating history of the Eighteenth Amendment reveals the surprising relationship between Prohibition and other social movements and explores its lasting impact on American life.

Lynne Olson. Citizens of London: The Americans Who Stood with Britain in Its Darkest, Finest Hour. Random House. $28 (ISBN 978-1-4000-6758-9).
In this compelling portrait three influential individuals persuade a reluctant president to come to the aid of a beleaguered nation in the early days of World War II.

Nathaniel Philbrick. The Last Stand: Custer, Sitting Bull, and the Battle of the Little Bighorn. Viking. $30 (ISBN 9780670021727).
An epic encounter between two iconic individuals is vividly portrayed in fluid, evocative, and decidedly objective prose.

Rebecca Skloot. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. Crown. $26 (ISBN 978-1-4000-5217-2).
A science writer uncovers the fascinating story of an African-American woman’s cancer cells harvested for medical research, thereby raising important questions of bioethics.

Patti Smith. Just Kids. Ecco. $27 (ISBN 978-0-06-621131-2).
The poet and musician’s endearing memoir about her relationship with Robert Mapplethorpe captures life and art in New York City during the 1960s and ‘70s.

John Vaillant. The Tiger: A True Story of Vengeance and Survival. Knopf. $26.95 (ISBN 978-0-307-26893-8).
Russia’s ecological and cultural history serves as the backdrop for this riveting adventure tale of man versus beast.

Isabel Wilkerson. The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration. Random House. $30 (ISBN 9780-679-44432-9).
The twentieth century exodus of over 6 million black Americans from the South is sensitively retold through the lives of three who left.

Poetry

C.K. Williams. Wait: Poems. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. $25 (ISBN 978-0374285913).
A lifetime of experience is distilled into a slim but significant volume of verse by this Pulitzer and National Book Award winning poet.

Tony Hoagland. Unincorporated Persons in the Late Honda Dynasty: Poems. Graywolf Press. $15 (ISBN 978-1-155597-549-4).
These poems capture the absurdities and loneliness of American life using matter of fact language and humor.

Notable Books, 2011, committee members: A. Issac Pulver, Saratoga Springs Public Library, chair; Terry Beck, Sno-Isle Libraries; Susie Brown, Shaker Heights Public Library; Julie Elliott, Indiana University—South Bend; Bill Kelly, Cuyahoga County Public Library; Elizabeth Olesh, Nassau Library System; Jessica Pigza, New York Public Library; Nancy Pearl; Heather Robideaux, Fayetteville Public Library; Nonny Schlotzhauer, The Pennsylvania State University; Andrea Slonosky; and Valerie Morgan Taylor, Great Falls Library.

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Philosophy can be considered one of the “key” subjects, unlocking as is does much of the theoretical conversations that take place in other fields. It can also be a daunting proposition for librarians trying to develop a collection that is broad enough to capture the subject, yet deep enough to take users beyond a rudimentary level. Wayne Bivens-Tatum, the philosophy and religion librarian at Princeton University, offers a guided tour through the possibilities and must-have’s of a basic collection with advice for public librarians and advanced graduate subject specialists. With an expert voice and comforting reassurance, Bivens-Tatum examines the resources and explains not just what to collect but what makes each title useful. Readers who enjoy his clear insight can read more of his ruminations on libraries, reference, and the humanities on his Academic Librarian blog available at academiclibrarian.net. He can be reached at rbivens@princeton.edu.—Editor

Philosophy as an area of study is both circumscribed and limitless. As studied in American colleges and universities, philosophy is a very focused field. However, every subject has a philosophical aspect, and some use the term philosophy to mean an entire worldview. In this review, I am limiting myself to philosophy as it isstudied in the majority of philosophy departments at Anglo-American universities, that is, the Western philosophical tradition beginning with the ancient Greeks and developing as a more or less coherent body of thought revolving around a family of common questions.

Philosophers, like most scholars in the humanities, rarely seek research help from librarians. There are several reasons for this. First, rather than gather immense amounts of data or read large numbers of books and articles for their research, philosophers tend to analyze a few sources and arguments in great depth. Except for historians of philosophy, philosophers rarely need to do exhaustive searches for information or esoteric archival work because most of what they study is contained in a few books and journals with which they are already familiar. Students of philosophy are usually trained in philosophical analysis and are guided by their professors to both methods and sources of analysis.

Another possible reason that philosophers and philosophy students need less research help is because, for a relatively compact discipline, philosophy has a remarkably robust bibliographic and reference apparatus, and sources are easy to >find. The major index to the field is quite good and has competition. There are three major encyclopedias vying for attention, as well as a host of excellent reference tools developed by Oxford, Cambridge, and Blackwell presses among others.

In this column, I will address some major tools in philosophy reference, focusing on English-language resources. A librarian with access to all these resources should be able to address almost any research need in philosophy, as well as be able to identify philosophy titles necessary for purchase to build a comprehensive collection. I am including all the sources I consider necessary for a basic, solid philosophy reference collection, but I will note throughout what are essential for different levels of philosophy support.

Philosophy Literature

Philosopher’s Index

The Philosopher’s Index bills itself as the “world’s most current and comprehensive bibliography of scholarly research in philosophy,” and that is undoubtedly true. It has been the standard index for philosophy literature for decades. It indexes over 680 journals and claims to have over 450,000 records. Though it began in 1970, retrospective indexing goes back to 1940. It is published by the Philosophy Information Center and is available by subscription online through Ebsco, OCLC, Ovid, and ProQuest. If your library supports a philosophy department, this is a necessary index.

Philosophy Research Index

This index is brand new and is designed to compete with the Philosopher’s Index. At the moment, it indexes 360 journals in multiple languages, but its ultimate goal is to provide extensive bibliographic coverage of philosophy comparable to or exceeding the Philosopher’s Index and at a much better price. (The Philosopher’s Index was originally published by the Philosophy Documentation Center (PDC). However, the copyright was owned by Richard Lineback, and when he left the PDC in 1995 he took the Philosopher’s Index with him.) The PDC publishes numerous journals and tools, and with Intelex publishes POIESIS: Philosophy Online Serials, which provides searchable digitized content for journals otherwise available only in print. The Philosophy Research Index could eventually become the major index for philosophy. It currently claims to have 650,000 citations, which is more than the Philosopher’s Index, but in several subject searches I tried, the Philosopher’s Index came up with more and better results. For the time being, the Philosopher’s Index is still the top index.

PhilPapers

PhilPapers is a directory of online philosophy articles and books. Philosophers can submit entries, but it also automatically crawls 309 online journals, as well as articles posted to the websites of about 1,900 philosophers. Your library must have a subscription to access many of the journals, but it also links to open-access journals, online archives, and papers on philosophers’ personal websites. Thus, it will not only have citations included in the Philosopher’s Index and the Philosophy Research Index but preprints and other typically unindexed material. It currently claims to have 305,000 entries.

Intelex Past Masters

Past Masters from Intelex can provide online full-text access to critical editions of the works of many major figures in the history of philosophy from Plato to Pierce, sometimes both in their original language and in English translation. Each title is a standalone purchase based on FTE, with a low yearly access fee and discounts after a certain amount has been spent. Larger libraries may want to purchase the complete works of Descartes, Hegel, Kant, Nietzsche, and Wittgenstein in their original languages. But even smaller libraries could benefit from smaller anthology collections such as The Continental Rationalists and British Philosophy 1600–1900.

Philosophy Reference

Dictionaries

Audi, Robert. The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy, 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999 (ISBN: 978052-163136-5).

Honderich, Ted, ed. The Oxford Companion to Philosophy. 2nd ed. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2005 (ISBN: 978-019-926479-7). (Also available in Oxford Reference Online.)

Every reference collection should have a dictionary of philosophy or two, and every librarian who collects for philosophy or works with students should have one handy. There are dozens of dictionaries of philosophy available, but I’ve listed the two best. My favorite is The Oxford Companion to Philosophy. Like most other entries in this series, The Oxford Companion to Philosophy is an excellent single-volume reference work. It has short entries on most areas of philosophy, as well as biographies of many philosophers. Robert Audi’s Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy is similar, with some longer entries, and more coverage of non-Western thought. Libraries that can afford to should purchase both titles.

Encyclopedias

Borchert, Donald M., ed. Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2nd ed. Detroit, Mich.: Macmillan, 2006. (ISBN: 978-002-865780-6). (Also in Gale Virtual Reference Library.)

Craig, Edward, ed. Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy. London: Routledge, 2000. (ISBN: 978-041-507310-3). (http://www.rep.routledge.com)

Zalta, Edward N., ed. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Stanford, Calif.: Metaphysics Research Lab, Center for the Study of
Language and Information, Stanford University, 1995. (http://plato.stanford.edu)

Philosophy is unusual in having three major, comprehensive encyclopedias competing to cover a relatively focused, though 2,500-year-old, field. All three are excellent in their way. The Encyclopedia of Philosophy is the 2nd edition of the 1967 Encyclopedia of Philosophy edited by Paul Edwards. The older edition was the standard for thirty years and is widely available in libraries. For some historical topics the older edition is still sometimes useful, but the 2nd edition is completely revised and current. It has longish articles with extensive bibliographies written by experts on every area of philosophy. It is also available online through the Gale Reference Library, but the print volumes are recommended if online is too expensive.

The same cannot be said of the Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy. The Routledge Encyclopedia is outstanding and comprehensive, but while it was first designed as a print encyclopedia, it lives more naturally online. The entries tend to be shorter than the Encyclopedia of Philosophy, with many cross-references. In print, this means you really need all ten volumes in front of you, whereas online those cross-references become hyperlinks, making the Routledge Encyclopedia very web-friendly. Online, the entries are updated quarterly. The articles are written by experts in the field and contain excellent bibliographies. Highly recommended.

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is possibly the best open-access reference work. It started under NEH grants and is now partially funded by an endowment created through contributions by libraries and philosophy departments all over the world. Expert philosophers are commissioned to write the entries, which are very in-depth with extensive bibliographies. It is not as comprehensive as the other major encyclopedias, partly because it is still a work in progress (commissioned but unfinished entries are included but have no content). Nevertheless, the content there is excellent, and it is freely available.

I have emphasized the bibliographies of these encyclopedias because for collection development purposes they are invaluable, especially if your library has no philosophy approval plan. Though it is relatively inexpensive to provide decent coverage for philosophy as it is practiced in mainstream philosophy departments (possibly twenty publishers and a hundred or so journals publish most of the content that most philosophers write and read), not all libraries will want even this minimal coverage. Others will want to make sure that subcategories of philosophy are well covered at their libraries, and the major entries in these encyclopedias will provide good checklists for books to collect, whether critical editions of historical philosophers in the original languages and translation or key titles for newer topics that might be of interest. (For free examples of useful bibliographies for collection development, see the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entries on “Cosmopolitanism” or “The Moral Status of Animals.”)

Most college, university, and mid- to large-sized public libraries should probably have the Encyclopedia of Philosophy or the Routledge Encyclopedia in print at the very least and preferably have both print and online versions. If your library is supporting a philosophy department, having at least one of them online is very useful. For others, the Stanford Encyclopedia alone might suffice, and you cannot beat the price.

Guides, Summaries, and Bibliographies

Blackwell Philosophy Companions, Guides, and Anthologies Blackwell’s philosophy reference collection is outstanding.

The Compleat Philosophy Librarian

At the time of writing, there are a hundred or so Companions and Guides relevant to philosophy. Each entry in those two series is a solid, thorough introduction to, and overview of, the topic at hand. Though there are a handful of guides to major philosophers such as Kant or Nietzsche, the bulk of both series cover major philosophical fields (ethics, epistemology, metaphysics, etc.) as well as prominent sub-fields (such as bioethics or medical ethics). The separate articles within the Companions and Guides are lengthy with extensive bibliographies. I would consider the print volumes of most of the Blackwell titles essential for any library supporting even an undergraduate program in philosophy. Some are more basic than others, and for the most basic collection, the Companions to epistemology, metaphysics, and ethics, for example, would be more necessary than the Companions to early modern philosophy or Christian ethics, but I would recommend any that are relevant to your users. Most of the titles are available via subscription in the Blackwell Reference Online database, if that’s an affordable option. Blackwell Reference Online has one of the strongest humanities reference collections available. Though not reference titles as such, the corresponding Blackwell Anthologies make excellent complements to the Companions and Guides. A student interested in contemporary ethics, for example, and armed with the Blackwell Guide to Ethical Theory, the Companion to Ethics, and Ethical Theory: An Anthology, would be well prepared to begin serious study.

The Cambridge Companions to Philosophy

The Cambridge Companions to Philosophy, Religion, and Culture series (of which about seventy-five or so titles are relevant to philosophy) provide excellent introductions to most major philosophers and some philosophical movements. Each volume has a series of essays on important areas of the philosopher’s work as well as useful bibliographies. If a student was interested in an area of philosophy such as ethics or aesthetics, I would suggest the relevant Blackwell Companion or Guide, but if a student was interested in a particular philosopher, I would suggest the Cambridge Companions. The two series complement each other well. The Cambridge Companions are available online via subscription through the Cambridge Collections Online database. The print volumes are essential for any library supporting classes in philosophy, but the online volumes are very handy to have for larger libraries.

Roth, John K., Christina J. Moose, and Rowena Wildin. World Philosophers and Their Works. Pasadena, Calif: Salem Press, 2000 (ISBN: 978-089-356878-8).

World Philosophers and their Works is Masterplots for major philosophers. The five volumes in this set provide extensive summaries, bibliographic essays, and lists of further reading for more than two hundred major works of philosophy. If you want a good, clear introduction to the main ideas and major themes of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics or Kant’s Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, this is a good place to go. I would recommend it from upper high school through undergraduate use or for general readers who want to explore some philosophical classics. There’s an out-of-print 1982 set with more or less the same content, World Philosophy: Essay-Reviews of 225 Major Works, also from Salem Press. Most libraries could get by with either edition, especially since more current bibliographies are usually available in the encyclopedias.

Oxford Bibliographies Online

Oxford Bibliographies Online is another new product and is Oxford University Press’s first publication created only for the Internet. There are several modules available. The philosophy module currently has fifty-nine entries, ranging from broad topics like “Epistemology” to narrower topics like “Rule-following” or “Semantic Externalism.” Each entry is a lengthy annotated bibliography covering the major books and articles in the area. The organization and annotations are very well done, and the individual citations link to link-resolvers and Worldcat.org, and users can export citations or save them if they create an OBO account. A bibliography on a relevant topic would give an advanced student a full representation of the most important works to read and a librarian a list of the most important works to buy. If your library supports a philosophy graduate program, this resource is almost essential.

Philosophy Book Reviews

Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews

Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews is a great source for reviews of philosophy books. Edited by a couple of philosophers at Notre Dame, NDPR has published a dozen or two book reviews every month since January 2002. The reviews are 1,500–2,000 words. NDPR could be valuable for philosophy students wanting to know more about a book before they read it, but for librarians its greatest use is probably for collection development. Because the reviews usually appear within six to twelve months of the book’s publication, they are timely, and the books they review should still be easily available. You can visit the site or sign up for an e-mail list.

Conclusion

If you want to be able to help users find literature on philosophical topics but have absolutely no money to spend, the two free resources on this list will go a long way. Between PhilPapers, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, and possibly WorldCat.org, library users should be able to get a basic overview of many philosophical topics and a recommended list of reading, if not the sources themselves. As with most fields in the humanities, if you can identify a recent and relevant work or two from a solid journal or good scholarly press, then you should stop searching for a while and start chasing footnotes. PhilPapers and the Stanford Encyclopedia have thousands of current articles and recent bibliographies between them.

If you’re in a large public library with a philosophy reference collection, you can do a good job at general reference with relatively little cost. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is free online. This should be supplemented with either the Encyclopedia of Philosophy or the Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy (depending on the price). The Oxford Companion to Philosophy is useful and inexpensive as well.

For academic libraries, the recommendations depend on the scope of the philosophy department and the library budget. If it’s a small department with no graduate program, I would recommend the Philosopher’s Index, supplemented by the free PhilPapers. A healthy selection of Companions by Cambridge and Blackwell would also be good. Though philosophers get to most of their sources through other sources, occasionally they will need the standard index for their field. At least one of the major philosophical encyclopedias other than the Stanford Encyclopedia is a necessity, and both would be preferable.

For larger academic libraries and philosophy departments with graduate programs, the minimum desirable collection would include the Philosopher’s Index, all three of the major encyclopedias (though not necessarily all online), Oxford Bibliographies Online, the Cambridge Companions to philosophy, and the Blackwell philosophy Companions, Guides, and Anthologies.

I have deliberately focused on what I see as a core collection and have ignored a wide range of philosophy reference works, including works in languages other than English and works about non-Western philosophy. Most academic libraries should stock a range of more specialized works, such as Becker’s three-volume Encyclopedia of Ethics (2nd ed. Rout-ledge, 2001) or Post’s five-volume Encyclopedia of Bioethics (Macmillan, 2004), to name just a couple. For a comprehensive overview of philosophical reference works, see Hans Bynagle’s Philosophy: A Guide to the Reference Literature (3rd ed. Westport, Conn.: Libraries Unlimited, 2006). Its 389 pages and 866 entries will take you more deeply into the philosophy reference literature than most libraries are ever likely to want or need to go.

Correspondence concerning this column should be addressed to Neal Wyatt, The Alert Collector, c/o RUSA, 50 E. Huron, Chicago, IL 60611; e-mail: alertcollector@comcast.net. Wyatt is a collection development and readers’ advisory librarian from Virginia. She wrote The Readers’ Advisory Guide to Nonfiction (ALA Editions, 2007), is the editor of Library Journal’s “Reader’s Shelf” column, author of Booksmack!’s “RA Crossroads” whole collection RA column, and compiles LJ’s weekly “Wyatt’s World Lists.”

Wayne Bivens-Tatum is the Philosophy and Religion Librarian at Princeton University.

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As noted in this column in RUSQ 48(2) (“Building on a Firm Foundation: Readers’ Advisory Over the Next Twenty Five Years”), one of the challenges facing readers’ advisors in the coming years will be format-based advisory. Our audience needs to expand beyond just the reader to include viewers and listeners, and we need to be alert to both the similarities and the differences between working with these users and working with those interested in print materials. In the following column, Tara Bannon Williamson begins the conversation, looking at how we can best work with the reader, viewer, and listener and listing some of the tools that are available to advisors. Williamson, librarian at the Schlessman Family Branch Library, the busiest of Denver Public Library’s branches, chaired the Colorado Association of Libraries readers’ advisory special interest group, founded Denver Public Library’s current readers’ advisory group, and is an adjunct professor at the University of Denver’s Library and Information Science Program, where she taught the readers’ advisory course offered spring quarter 2010. She also will be teaching this course summer 2011. Williamson also is a frequent contributor to NoveList.—Editor

The library continues to dynamically evolve into a thriving destination, alive with sound and rich in format. Steadily, the library world has seen and embraced new formats, from the original books on tape and VHS to the new formats of playaways and downloadable electronic media. Library customers drive this change with their eager acceptance of and hunger for these and other types of audiovisual material. As film rental stores suffer through bankruptcies, libraries must seize their opportunity. People seeking traditional brick-and-mortar video rental can enjoy our physical space, while Netflix and Amazon customers who expect recommendations while browsing also can have their needs met through readers’ advisory.

How then does a readers’ advisor adapt to the growing demand for nonprint materials? A new terminology is required. Rather than develop different skills and terms for viewers’ advisory, listeners’ advisory, and readers’ advisory, an all-encompassing term should be created to reflect the universal and modern nature of our skills. Materials matchmaking implies the level of personal preference that informs each interaction while keeping the result set broad and unlimited by format.

Without realizing it, many customers already expect a recommendation model not limited by format, much like that provided by Amazon. Those without expectation are educated on library scope when offered multiple formats when they simply provided a title. A customer interested in Marley and Me may be delighted to learn of the availability of not only the book by John Grogan, but also the film starring Owen Wilson, the audiobook narrated by Johnny Heller, or the kids’ books by various authors.

Offering multiformat materials advisory to library customers is not significantly different from offering traditional library services, it simply requires a broader filter when creating connections between customers and library materials. Ascertaining whether or not the customer is looking for a specific suggestion, an answer to a question, or requesting a barrage of possibilities is the first step.

Providing materials matchmaking for nonreaders will guarantee the sustainability of the library by showing relevance to all members of the community and by providing a possible bridge to more traditional library services, including requesting print material. Customers who start by requesting informational videos can be enriched by considering the print collection and vice versa. Pitman states, “In fact, there are all kinds of questions that we answer by automatically pointing patrons toward the book stacks that we could just as easily (if not better) handle with video format.”¹

When working with readers, we use the elements of appeal to make connections to new books and authors. Saricks writes that these same concepts of appeal, “pacing, characterization, story line, frame (physical setting and atmosphere), tone and mood, and style and language,”² will also help connect viewers and listeners with new materials. There are, however, some new facets to consider when applying these appeal factors across formats.

Applying Appeal Factors Across Formats

Film

Appeal factors can be applied when discussing audiovisual formats as well as print, although some translation is required and additional questions should be posed when mining information related to the viewer’s interests. In some ways, recommending DVDs can be simpler than working with books as there are more contributing entities. While a book typically has one author, a DVD can be seen to have many. While listening to your customer, pay attention to whether it is the overall film (director), dialogue (writer), characters (actors), or another element entirely, and that can lead you to a wealth of suggestions. Genre terms and definitions are directly transferable from print to film.

Setting, an important factor/element for readers, may be an even larger consideration for viewers. In many films, the setting is almost a character unto itself, with possible theme music, moods, and intent. While watching a film may be less of a time investment than reading a book, for many viewers films evoke a stronger immediate emotional bond and reaction by eliciting more of our senses. With high-definition films and televisions becoming more common, the setting is more than coming into focus; it is assuming a role on stage.

Cinematography in a film can be loosely equated to the use of language or tone in a book. Cinematography is the artistic unveiling of the film, the silent narrator, while the tone and language of a book play the same role. A customer requesting films that are dark and ominous may not only be referring to the plot or the setting of the film but to the pace and cinematography.

As with setting, customers may have a different tolerance level for cursing, sexual content, and violence when consuming books and movies. Hearing and seeing this sort of thing affect some people more potently, while for others, the imagining the violence or hearing the words in their mind affect them more deeply. Most films come with ratings, warnings, and content notes that can help the customer and the librarian make an informed decision about what they are taking home.

Music

For most librarians, music may be the most intimidating arena in which to make recommendations. In addition to musical tastes being intensely personal, listeners may struggle with how to talk about music. Music lovers often identify with a genre or subgenre or perhaps a few particular artists but often cannot articulate the elements that attract them to one musical group or artist over another. When working with listeners, using genre while applying additional searchable criteria such as imprint and date of publication can yield the most efficient and effective results.

In the world of independent music, the recording label is often congruent with the publishing company. Not only are they aligned with the tastes of their niche customers but also may represent a self-identified subgenre. When providing readers’ advisory, it is useful to know that the imprint Luna, a subset of Harlequin, concentrates on paranormal romance. Similarly in the music world, Brushfire Records, formed by Jack Johnson, and Righteous Babe Records, formed by Ani DiFranco, both feature artists whose styles are similar to these performers.

Although date of publication is not generally of import when making reading recommendations, it can be a portal for creating solid music recommendations. Musical influences, styles, and lyrics are heavily influenced by the era in which they were produced, reflecting not only the political and popular influences of the period but embodying the spirit of the day and evoking memories and emotions remembered by the listener.

The environment or activity in which the customer wishes to enjoy their music will also inform your recommendation. Customers requesting workout music will have different expectations than pregnant mothers seeking to nurture the tiny genius gestating within. Tempo, lyrical content, and genre will be factors to consider during materials matchmaking. During the interview, establishing a solid baseline regarding preferences and expected outcomes will guide your interaction and inform your suggestions.

Being aware of local radio stations, music venues, and trends can keep you abreast of recent releases and events that may be of interest to your customers and can improve your recommendations. During the materials matchmaking interview, inquiring about their favorite radio stations can inform your recommendation beyond asking what “kind” of music they like.

Audiobooks

Audiobooks are most easily approached using standard appeal terms because the content is identical to that of the print item, except in the case of abridged material. The added facets of narration, length of recording, intended listening arena, and format are important ingredients to also consider.

In addition to the concerns of story, setting, mood, language, and character, audiobook advisory requires a knowledge and sensitivity to things such as the narrative voice, reading style, where the auditor plans to listen to the recording, and what sort of media format the auditor needs and desires. These new ways of thinking about audiobooks also can apply to working with users interested in help finding music and films.³

Male voices are generally more popular for listeners and easier for older adults to hear due to the lower register.⁴ Multicast performances will appeal to fans of the old radio shows and those that struggle with distinguishing characters or are less experienced with audiobooks. Authors reading their own work appeal to many listeners because “the writer as narrator format lends authenticity and makes listening even more intimate.”⁵ When assisting a customer new to listening to books who does not know what they prefer in a narrator, it is wise to send them home with female, male, and multicast vocal selections so they may explore their preference, if any.

Becoming familiar with a varied selection of notable and award-winning narrators is a significant first step in creating a successful audiobook advisory experience. The Audie Awards, sponsored by the Audio Publishers Association, bestows accolades on multiple aspects of production and narration in more than thirty different categories. While the selections are a springboard, the breakdown of types offers valuable insight into appeal terms for this format.

Becoming a Recommendation Engine

A recommendation engine provides suggestions that are based on a customer’s tastes and usage. Until a library product is successfully created to exist within our OPACs or on top of our catalogs, library staff will need to become recommendation engines. Providing advisory services to our users fortifies the role of the library in its community by making connections between people and materials and building relationships with library users through conversation and overlapping interests. Iskold writes:

A great recommendation system can retain and attract users to the service. For example when a user returns a movie, he/she is recommended another movie they might like—which increases the likelihood of return business.⁶

Being able to successfully suggest a film, CD, or book increases our relevancy in our users’ lives and increases the likelihood of a return visit and word of mouth referral.

In addition to consuming as much media as you can muster, listening to those around you talk about what they like and why, and asking customers where they hear about their items and why they like them, there are several online and print tools that the materials matchmaker can use to insure a successful interaction. While no universal tool yet exists to answer any audiovisual reference or recommendation question, several excel at addressing specific common interactions.

Print Resources

Print resources can be effective during materials matchmaking depending on the currency of the publication date and the quality of the indexing. Leonard Maltin’s 2011 Movie Guide, The Time Out Film Guide 2011, and Halliwell’s Film Guide are excellent examples of film catalogues that contain reviews, indexes of performers, and lists of award winners. The magazine Video Librarian “is the video review magazine for public, school, academic, and special libraries, as well as video fans who are interested in a wider variety of titles than what’s found in the average video store” and is a great way to stay up-to-speed with new releases.⁷ While excellent for general review, browsing, or familiarizing yourself with names and titles, these resources are generally too static to be effective during material matchmaking.

Online Resources

IMDb (The Internet Movie Database)
IMDb, which turned twenty in October of 2010, is now an affiliate of Amazon. IMDb “started as a dream to make a tool that we, as movie fans, would find really useful and fun. Over the years, millions of other movie fans have found it useful and fun too.”⁸ Most effective when answering questions such as “which films were Kathryn Hepburn and Spencer Tracy costars?” and providing filmographies, movie summaries, and trivia, IMDb is one of the best and most popular of the freely available movie databases.⁹ For those screening by content, IMDb provides a Parent’s Guide field that provides in-depth content advisory on sex and nudity; violence and gore; profanity; alcohol, drugs, and smoking; and frightening and intense scenes on a scale of 1 to 10 with reasoning.

Rotten Tomatoes
Featuring box office information, release dates, reviews, and celebrity news, Rotten Tomatoes is unique in that it allows you to search by critic. Early in 2010, Rotten Tomatoes joined forces with Flixster to create a “database of more than 250,000 movies, 2.3 billion user reviews, 500,000 critic reviews, more than 20,000 trailers and videos,” plus local movie showtimes.¹⁰ Customers looking for the hottest titles with the most scandalous stars will enjoy recommendations plucked from this site.

Filmsite
“Filmsite—also known as Greatest Films—is a unique website containing interpretive, descriptive review commentary and historical background, and hundreds of colorful, vintage film posters for some of the best Hollywood and American classic films in the last century.”¹¹ While limited by publication date and country of origin, Filmsite is affiliated with American Movie Classics and provides extensive film lists that film buffs can accept as definitive. Customers looking for broad lists of “The Greatest Films” or “Controversial Films” or genre studies like film noir, chick flicks, and greatest disaster film scenes will enjoy this site.

TuneGlue
For those wishing to find more musical groups or artists similar to another, TuneGlue provides a visual map that creates a web of connections that stimulates discovery by providing an accurate and intriguing suggestion result set. Connections can be formed between multiple groups, strengthening the potency of the recommendation. Each search creates nodes, which you click to expand to reveal four to six suggestions that are related to the original query and are connected with an elastic line. Expanding several nodes reveals a web of connections between musical groups and artists. These connections, generated by LastFM and Amazon, are entirely user-driven.¹² Rather than being a tool to answer a specific question, this is an excellent resource for those seeking exploration and discovery of new artists in relation to beloved favorites.

Musicovery
Musicovery generates an online radio station based on searches, and most uniquely, mood. Arranged like compass points, the listener is presented with the selections of Energetic, Positive, Calm, and Dark. Further refining the search, the user can select decade and genres (rock, metal, blues, gospel, jazz, R&B, rap, electro, Latino, classical, soundtrack, world, reggae, soul, funk, disco, pop and vocal pop) to further home in on the desired results. In addition to mood radio, Musicovery offers dance radio searching with Tempo +, Dance +, Tempo -, and Dance -, at the compass points also further refined by decade and genre. Musicovery’s full benefits may not be recognized at the reference desk because audible streaming music may not be condoned at your location, or it may not be equipped to handle it.

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There has been a long-standing interest within the academic librarian community to provide support for graduate students involved in interdisciplinary research. This column focuses on the challenges that researchers face when seeking information in an unfamiliar disciplinary area as well as what is known about the information behaviors of interdisciplinary researchers. Using a framework of information seeking strategies, elements of a course for interdisciplinary graduate students are proposed. Topics that are addressed are learning about the culture and language of an unfamiliar discipline; including the scholarly communication apparatus and organization of information; mechanisms for identifying and locating key authors, publications, research institutions, and emerging research fronts; how to determine when enough information has been gathered; and keeping up with the latest research.—Editor

Given the increase in the number and interest in interdisciplinary programs and research in U.S. institutions of higher education, academic librarians should be involved in determining the information literacy needs of graduate students in interdisciplinary areas.¹ Don Spanner expresses this need in his published study of a group of interdisciplinary researchers:

Is it solely the domain of scholars? What is the “trickle down” effect on students as curriculum shifts to encompass interdisciplinarity? Such a determination would allow reference librarians to consider the importance of developing the necessary bibliographic instructional skills to support both scholars and students in their research.²

Recent studies of the information needs and behavior of interdisciplinary researchers, including graduate students, demonstrate that researchers have difficulties discovering authoritative information sources when venturing outside their major field of study.³ What approaches have librarians and other information scientists found for teaching graduate students about developing vocabularies and learning about core information sources outside of their main disciplinary domains? This article attempts to answer this question by first exploring the information behaviors of interdisciplinary researchers and the difficulties they face in locating the key sources of information outside their disciplines. From this review and analysis, information literacy instruction approaches are proposed for creating a course for interdisciplinary graduate students on the following topics: learning about the culture and language of an unfamiliar discipline; how new research is communicated and made accessible to others; identifying and locating key authors, publications, and research institutions through chaining, or footnote chasing; probing activities to increase breadth of information gathered through searching multidisciplinary databases and federated search products; networking; keeping up with the research literature; and the integration and consolidation of interdisciplinary knowledge.

Challenges of Interdisciplinary Research

Lynn Westbrook describes interdisciplinary research as “the purposeful weaving together of two or more disciplines that are usually considered to be quite unconnected in order to reach a new understanding, create a new academic end product or advance research on a particular question.”⁴ From an extensive literature review of issues facing interdisciplinary researchers, themes that emerged are the need to learn the language and culture of the other discipline, the information-scatter issue for highly distributed research areas, the nature and quality of bibliographic apparatuses to search for information, and keeping up with current research.

For interdisciplinary researchers, there is a need to become familiar with the cultural assumptions, language, and the organization of knowledge in the “other” discipline.⁵ Being able to communicate with those outside one’s own discipline requires knowledge of the vocabulary of the other discipline. In addition, terminology may have a different meaning across disciplines. This can lead to similar research being conducted in different disciplines.⁶ Allen Foster reports the challenges for interdisciplinary researchers in identifying key research studies, themes, disciplinary communities, and the important authors in a field.⁷

There is also the issue of information scatter as described by Lynn Westbrook:

“Scatter” is a measure of the number and structure of the resources in an academic discipline. Traditional academic disciplines are tightly defined with a relatively small number of professional organizations, scholarly journals, heavily used reference tools and periodical indices.⁸

Within a well-established discipline, such as geology, information resource scatter will be low and highly identifiable. Women’s studies, on the other hand, is seen as being a “high scatter” interdisciplinary area where information resources are highly dispersed across a number of disciplines. Scholars in such fields have a greater learning curve,⁹ and the need to gather more information and have more contacts is higher than disciplinary scholars.¹⁰ For highly scattered interdisciplinary areas, this can be a barrier for assistant professors who also have responsibilities for teaching and tenure requirements.¹¹

In the realm of bibliographic databases, there are ease of use issues related to multiple interfaces, varying amounts of depth and specificity in indexing, and inconsistency in the use of controlled vocabulary and acronyms across all subject areas.¹²

Other challenges for interdisciplinary scholars are the need for current information and in keeping up in multiple disciplinary areas. This is also true for disciplinary scholars. The difference lies in the amount of literature to review and the information scatter discussed above.¹³ Carole Palmer describes the myriad tasks that interdisciplinarians face:

Keeping up with and using information across fields requires maintaining awareness of the many different facets of a research problem, the new work in relevant subjects, as well as potential emerging areas of importance.¹⁴

In summary, challenges for interdisciplinary researchers include learning the culture and language used in an unfamiliar discipline, identifying key researchers and research areas, and developing a method for keeping up with new research findings across disciplinary areas.

Information-Seeking Behaviors of Interdisciplinary Researchers

A useful framework for teaching graduate students in interdisciplinary programs is to follow the categories of information-seeking behaviors that have been variously described in the library and information science literature. David Ellis’s grounded theory approach for describing information-seeking behaviors of researchers is a good place to begin the exploration of models of information seeking activities.¹⁵ Based on interviews with social scientists, chemists, physicists, and English literature scholars, Ellis found similar information-seeking practices used by researchers in disparate disciplines even though the terminology differed. Ellis’s information-seeking model has the following categories:

• Starting/initial familiarization/surveying—initial information search (literature search, etc.)
• Chaining/chasing/verifying—following references from one source to other relevant information sources
• Browsing—semidirected searching (used by social scientists)
• Differentiating—identifying and differentiating between types of publications, journals and publishers, generalist and specialist (social scientists)
• Selection and sifting/source prioritization—prioritizing importance of sources
• Monitoring—keeping-up-to-date on specific publications or areas of research
• Extracting—mining a specific journal for relevant articles
• Assembly and dissemination—bringing material together for publication.

Allen Foster bases his model of information-seeking behavior on a study of interdisciplinary researchers at the University of Sheffield, UK.¹⁶ Three key processes of Foster’s nonlinear model are:

• Opening or beginning exploration—this includes such processes as networking, keyword searching, browsing, monitoring, and chaining;
• Orientation—identification of keywords, existing research, key disciplines, and problem definition or “picture building”¹⁷; and
• Consolidation—this is an iterative phase of refining, sifting, verifying, “knowing enough” and finishing.

The three key processes occur in a matrix of three elements: The internal context, the extent of knowledge already known to the researcher and level of experience. The external context includes limitation on time and conditions when entering an unfamiliar discipline such as access to resources, network of contacts, and navigation issues. The cognitive approach has to do with how information is processed, such as the ability and willingness for flexibility, openness, holistic thinking, and “nomadic thought.”¹⁸ Nomadic thought is similarly described by a researcher in Spanner’s study: “a fox knows many things … so I would describe myself as a fox or a kind of rhisomatic thinker—a kind of root system that extends out.”¹⁹

Carole Palmer, who has written extensively about information behavior of interdisciplinary researchers, describes the knowledge strategies used by interdisciplinary researchers, which can be summarized as (1) recruiting theoretical or applied experts; (2) consulting with colleagues and known authorities; and (3) learning, or the practice of “building one’s own knowledge base.”²⁰ This article will focus on this last strategy of building a knowledge base, which seems particularly appropriate for graduate students in their role as novice researchers.

A Model Course for Graduate Students in Interdisciplinary Programs

What would a course for teaching graduate students interdisciplinary information-seeking skills look like? Taking into account the known challenges for interdisciplinary researchers and the findings from recent information seeking studies, the following is offered as thematic elements for such a course:

• Orientation. Becoming familiar with the language and culture of an unfamiliar discipline. Understanding the organization of information for a specific discipline and the organization of information in academic libraries and specific disciplinary databases.
• Chaining/citation linking. Following references found in bibliographies as well as conducting citation searches in such databases as the Web of Science and some search engines, such as Google Scholar.
• Browsing/probing. Exploring a semidefined area of interest and determining networking mechanisms.
• Monitoring. Keeping up with current research and knowledge of research fronts.
• Consolidation and integration. Refining and sifting through information resources and knowing when enough information has been found.

This proposed course ideally would be co-taught with a librarian and a disciplinary instructor involved in interdisciplinary research. The disciplinary instructor would provide the disciplinary framework where real-world problems could be brought into the classroom for scenario-based problem solving activities. The librarian would provide the information-literacy perspective to address the many information-seeking challenges of interdisciplinary researchers.

As noted by Foster, and well known to instruction librarians, information-seeking behaviors are iterative and nonlinear.²¹ How to model this in the classroom? Foster’s suggestion is to start with simple research tasks and search strategies and build up to more complicated research scenarios and tasks, information sources, and searching techniques.²² This could be adopted in the interdisciplinary graduate student course outlined below.

Orientation

Exploring Disciplinary Cultures

One of the more formidable challenges for those working in an interdisciplinary program or research project is to become familiar with an unknown disciplinary culture and its language.

Repko describes the characteristics of a discipline as having the following elements:²³

1. phenomena, or what the discipline is concerned with, assumptions underlying the concepts and theories of a discipline
2. concepts and commonly accepted vocabulary
3. research methodologies
4. theories, or generalized explanations of how a particular phenomena works
5. epistemology—“what can be known about the world and how it can be known.”²⁴

One approach to understanding the structure of a field is to compare the known disciplinary culture, methodologies, and language with an unfamiliar disciplinary field. SantaVicca recommends a model using parallel logic for teaching students how to compare the way that two different disciplines are organized.²⁵ This provides students with “perceptual and cognitive skills” for developing knowledge in an interdisciplinary environment.²⁶ The first step involves comparing the definitions and organization of the two different disciplines using the language and texts from disciplinary practitioners themselves. SantaVicca suggests using quotations from a variety of practitioners in the field to represent how those in the discipline define themselves.²⁷ The quotations could be found in textbooks, autobiographies, and biographies of noted practitioners. Another approach is to determine how academic departments or professional entities organize themselves into fields of study.

Another approach would be to assign essays from a disciplinary encyclopedia that describe the history of the discipline. This would provide an understanding of the development of the discipline as well as why a discipline developed in a particular direction. Students would also learn about current areas of interest as well as those areas considered secondary or peripheral areas. Other approaches suggested by SantaVicca include reading articles that address the future of the discipline and interviewing practitioners in the field for their perspectives.²⁸

An approach for identifying key disciplinary terms and their meanings would be to introduce students to the concept of controlled vocabulary and thesauri. Palmer recommends having graduate students compare the meaning of words from one discipline to another.²⁹ Students could be given an exercise to choose an interdisciplinary topic, identify controlled vocabulary terms for that topic from at least two different disciplinary databases, and note the differences in the terms and their usage.

Scholarly Communication Mechanisms and the Organization of Information

With a familiarity of the disciplinary culture and language, the next segment of the course would focus on how new knowledge is transmitted in the discipline. Does a discipline use rapid communication methods to report new findings or does it rely on monographs to communicate new thinking? Having knowledge of the scholarly distribution mechanisms provides students insight into the types of communication and publication modes used by the discipline.

A good place to begin is to introduce students to the appropriate guides to the literature, such as Harner’s Literary Research Guide or Malinowsky’s Reference Sources in Science, Engineering, Medicine, and Agriculture. The guides not only provide information on disciplinary indexes and abstracts but are useful in identifying core journals, professional societies, and conferences.

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A new cataloging code, Resource Description and Access (RDA) was published in June 2010 and has been undergoing tests at select libraries. RDA is a departure from its predecessor, the Anglo-American Cataloging Rules, second edition (AACR2), in that it was designed for the online environment, is more principles-based, and better accommodates formats other than print. Liz Miller has been following the development of RDA for a few years and has presented on the topic twice at the New Mexico Library Association Conference. I was delighted when she approached me about writing an article on RDA, one geared to the noncataloger. In this column, reference librarians will learn why RDA was developed, what differences they will see, and how RDA contributes to a new world of library information.—Editor

A librarian is cataloging a DVD. She consults a cataloging code, the Anglo-American Cataloging Rules, second edition (AACR2), to make decisions about the pieces of information she will include in the catalog record. AACR2 also instructs her on such points as from where on the resource she should take information (for example, should she get the title information for the DVD from the title screen or from the disc label?), when and how to abbreviate words, and how to choose and construct access points.

To assign subject terms, she consults a controlled vocabulary, the Library of Congress Subject Headings. She consults yet another standard, the Library of Congress Classification, to assign a class number to collocate the DVD with other resources on the same topic.

In all of these processes she uses a standard digital format, Machine-Readable Cataloging (MARC), to encode the various pieces of information she has selected to include in the record. Correct MARC coding ensures the record will search and display properly in an electronic catalog. The record then becomes part of her library’s Integrated Library System (ILS), Millennium. The ILS software determines how the information in the record will be searched, retrieved, and displayed in the Online Public Access Catalog (OPAC), where it will be seen by users of the catalog, including patrons and reference librarians. You may begin to see why some have compared cataloging to solving a puzzle.

One piece of the puzzle is about to change. A new cataloging code, Resource Description and Access (RDA), has been developed to take the place of AACR2. The development of RDA is big news for catalogers, of course, but it has implications for reference librarians, too. This article is intended to give reference librarians an introduction to RDA. Readers will learn why RDA was developed, the principles upon which RDA is based, the differences between AACR2 records and RDA records, and why RDA is so important to catalogers yet also controversial.

Why Are Cataloging Codes Important?

In the past, each library would create its own catalog cards. This changed in the early 1900s when the Library of Congress began selling card sets (author, title, and subject) to other libraries. Every card set that a library purchased meant one less that had to be created locally, from scratch. This was an early instance of shared cataloging.¹

When MARC was developed in the 1960s, catalogers started creating records in electronic form. MARC made record sharing much easier because the information in the records could be exchanged between computers.² When a cataloger creates an electronic record from scratch and contributes it to a bibliographic utility such as OCLC, a cataloger from any other OCLC member library can download that record instead of creating its own original catalog record.³

One crucial factor that made it possible for libraries to share records with each other was the wide adoption of AACR2. A uniform cataloging code meant that every cataloger using it was creating records in the same way. It meant that a catalog record created in Poughkeepsie could be used by a library in Tacoma.⁴

Brief History of Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Cataloging Codes

To appreciate the importance of RDA, it is helpful to know something about the cataloging codes that preceded it. The first American and British cataloging rules were published in the nineteenth century. These included Sir Anthony Panizzi’s ninety-one rules for compilation of the British Museum’s printed catalog (1841) and Charles Ammi Cutter’s Rules for a Dictionary Catalog (1876). An early international code was developed by the American Library Association and the Library Association (Britain) in 1908. Revisions of this work were published in 1941 and 1949. The 1949 revision was a collection of cases, many of them very specialized. Because they were not based on an organizing theory, they were not helpful when catalogers had to deal with new situations, and as a result they were largely ignored outside North America.⁵ In the 1950s, Seymour Lubetzky of the Library of Congress analyzed the 1949 revision and recommended that further editions be based on guiding principles rather than consist of a number of cases.⁶

In 1961, the International Conference on Cataloguing Principles was held in Paris, where a statement of twelve principles, known as the Paris Principles, was agreed upon. The first Anglo-American Cataloging Rules (AACR) were published in 1967, in two substantially different versions, one for the United States and another for the United Kingdom and Commonwealth nations.

The two divergent versions of AACR were quickly seen as problematic from the standpoint of standardization, so AACR2 was published in 1978. Even though it was called AACR2, it was actually a new code, organized differently from AACR. It was called AACR2, however, because some thought that catalogers wouldn’t accept a completely new code just eleven years after AACR. This time, the United States and English/Commonwealth versions were essentially the same.⁷

Why Was A New Cataloging Code Developed?

When AACR2 was published in 1978, most library catalogs consisted of cabinets of drawers filled with cards.⁸ Most works collected by libraries were printed texts.⁹ By the early 1990s most libraries had converted their cards to electronic records.¹⁰ In the years since then, materials have become available in many more formats, including CD-ROMs and DVDs.¹¹ Both monographs and serials have moved increasingly to publication in electronic form.¹² Catalogers have had to deal with these changes as best they could, struggling to apply a cataloging code that has become increasingly out-of-date.¹³

The wider world has seen tremendous changes in technology and communications since 1978. Personal computers have become increasingly powerful and affordable, and the web has revolutionized the way people find information and communicate with each other. As web use became common, the expectations of library users changed. Users became accustomed to retrieving large sets of results from simple keyword searches and eventually viewed library catalogs as difficult to use.¹⁴

One reason that cataloging leaders felt the need to develop a new cataloging code is that AACR2 is seen as inadequate for the myriad types of resources that came into being after AACR2 was adopted. Although AACR2 was revised to accommodate the description of other media, it remains a print-oriented standard, and rules for describing other media are a kind of afterthought attached to the rules for describing printed books.¹⁵

AACR2 has chapters for different categories of materials (e.g., sound recordings, cartographic materials, motion pictures, and video recordings). As new technology has made different formats available, some of them falling into more than one of AACR2’s categories, a logical flaw has been exposed in the way materials are categorized in AACR2. Some categories are based on content (cartographic materials, graphic materials, three-dimensional artifacts), while others are based on carrier, that is, the physical medium in which data are stored (sound recordings, motion pictures, video recordings, computer files, and microforms).¹⁶

An example of a resource that falls into more than one of AACR2’s categories is a map that is issued electronically. Should a cataloger follow AACR2’s chapter on cartographic materials or the chapter on electronic resources?¹⁷

Another shortcoming of AACR2 is its strong Anglo-American bias. As more and more libraries around the world share records with each other, it is increasingly important to have a cataloging code that will be accepted beyond the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and Australia.¹⁸

Continuing the effort to make cataloging codes more principles-based and internationally accepted, in 1990 the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA) chartered a committee to study the way that bibliographic records function in relation to the needs of users. After several interim drafts, the committee produced Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR) in 1997.¹⁹

FRBR is usually described as a new conceptual model of the bibliographic universe.²⁰ It is helpful to remember that most of the concepts expressed in FRBR have been implicit in cataloging and authority work for decades, so they are not unfamiliar. However, in FRBR they are more explicitly defined and placed within a principle-based theoretical framework.²¹

FRBR defines four user tasks: find resources that meet the user’s stated search criteria; identify that a resource is the one that the user is looking for and distinguish between different resources with similar traits; select a resource that meets the user’s needs; and obtain access to the resource.²²

Besides being based on the above user tasks, FRBR is based on the entity-relationship model, a concept from the field of database design. This model consists of different entities and the relationships between them.²³ The model is more complex than the relational database model currently used in most library catalogs.

In the entity-relationship model, an entity can be thought of as a “thing.” There are different types of entities. Each entity is defined and has attributes that are also defined. In addition, each type of relationship between entities is defined and has defined attributes. This level of detail allows bibliographic data to be parsed out in very small pieces. The fact that each attribute is precisely defined means that users are able to identify and select resources with much more precision.²⁴

As an example, take a copy of the 1851 Harper edition of Moby Dick that was once owned by Abraham Lincoln. In FRBR terms, the particular edition of Moby Dick is a type of entity called “manifestation,” and the copy once owned by Abraham Lincoln is a type of entity called “item.” “Item” is defined as “a single exemplar of a manifestation.” Attributes of an item include “item identifier” (in most cases this would be a barcode number) and “provenance of the item,” which is defined as “previous ownership or custodianship of the item.” In the case of this book we would record that it was owned by Abraham Lincoln. Another attribute is “marks and inscriptions.” If Abraham Lincoln wrote any notes in the margin, this would be recorded as an attribute of the item, too. “Abraham Lincoln” is also a kind of FRBR entity: a person. Included in the attributes of “person” are name of person and dates of person (usually birth and death dates). Among the relationships between “item” and “person” are “owned by.” In the case of our copy of Moby Dick¸ we would record the relationship “owned by” between this item and the person “Abraham Lincoln.”²⁵

In a world of bibliographic information organized according to the FRBR principles, a researcher looking into Abraham Lincoln’s impressions of Herman Melville’s works could search a database for books by Melville that were once owned by Abraham Lincoln and had notes in the margins. The careful recording of books’ attributes (marks and inscriptions) and their relationships (owned by) to other FRBR entities (the person “Abraham Lincoln”) makes it possible to pinpoint works by Melville once owned by Abraham Lincoln with notations in the margins.

In a world without FRBR, this work would be very painstaking. A researcher would have to hope that the libraries that hold books once owned by Abraham Lincoln have recorded that information somewhere in the bibliographic record (probably in a note) and have also noted the presence of margin notes.

FRBR presents an opportunity to better collocate closely-related resources. For example, the book Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone was published in England by Bloomsbury in 1997. The same book was published in the United States by Scholastic as Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. It has been translated into many languages and has been published in different editions. FRBR would bring all these different versions together by creating an overarching entity called “work.”²⁶ The “work” Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone serves as an umbrella for the numerous translations, editions, and so on. This is helpful to users who would want to know that the English and United States versions are the same work, who seek to differentiate between editions, and want to discern between other Harry Potter books.

Library catalog data became searchable in more sophisticated ways when catalogs were automated and made available online. Yet as far as library data has come, it is still not very compatible with the web, the information environment with which most library users are familiar.²⁷

The problem with library data are that it is not as robust as other data to which users have become accustomed. An example of very robust data are the information that powers Google Maps, a service that allows a user to zoom in to almost any location on earth, find pictures of that location, switch to a view that simulates the experience of driving down a street, and much more. The data behind Google Maps is parsed out and linked, making it possible for computers to manipulate the data behind the scenes.²⁸

By contrast, most catalog records consist of text strings, not data that can be manipulated by computers in the manner of Google Maps. In addition, as useful as MARC has been to libraries, it is unlike any record format used by other data communities. As a result library data doesn’t work well with other data. This puts library data at a disadvantage when it comes to being discovered on the web.²⁹

In 2001, Tim Berners-Lee, director of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C),³⁰ articulated a vision of the future web called the Semantic Web. The Semantic Web would consist of data that is structured and linked in such a way that a computer can understand the meaning of the data, which would permit a computer to manipulate and synthesize the data in much more rich and complex ways than are possible on the web of today. The Semantic Web would rely on the development of a linked data structure that defines “things” and the relationships between things. The Semantic Web is currently being developed.³¹

Development of RDA

The Joint Steering Committee for Revision of AACR2 began meeting in 2004 to draft a major revision to AACR2, to be known as the Anglo-American Cataloging Rules, third edition (AACR3). Based on comments from a constituency review of an early draft, the committee decided that a completely different approach was needed. The work being drafted was renamed Resource Description and Access (RDA), and the committee was renamed the Joint Steering Committee for Development of RDA. The committee incorporated the FRBR principles into RDA. It also chose a scenario that assumes that RDA will be using the entity-relationship database adopted by FRBR.³² This database structure requires that information is parsed and defined in more detail and anticipates that RDA will work well with the Semantic Web.³³

Draft chapters of RDA were released between 2005 and 2007, and in 2008 a full draft was released. The text was revised based on public comments and a final draft was delivered to the publishers in June 2009. RDA was published in June 2010.³⁴

What Will RDA Mean to Users and Reference Librarians?

Many benefits of RDA will not be seen until other standards and systems are developed. Changes to the current record formatting standard (MARC) or the development of a completely new formatting standard may be required to fully bring out the various RDA entities and relationships. New ILSs will need to be developed to display the relationships between different FRBR entities in RDA records. Finally, the Semantic Web needs to be developed to exploit the interoperability of RDA with systems outside of libraries.