VIRTUAL REFERENCE COLLECTION DEVELO

VIRTUAL REFERENCE COLLECTION DEVELOPMENT
Discussion to this point has emphasized the key role of the reference librarian
in building collections of purchased or licensed materials. As explained in chapter 5,
with the advent of the open environment of the Web, where many different organizations
and individuals create sites that are freely accessible, it is necessary to expand
the well-established notions of reference sources and reference collections to
encompass these new resources. When connecting to the Web via a browser and Internet
connection, one has access to everything that has been made freely available on
the Web.
Two examples can be used to illustrate this change. Books in Print , long a standard
tool for verifying basic bibliographic information about books in print, now
competes with the descriptive and review information about books found on the Web
at the sites of Internet booksellers such as Amazon.com (http://www.amazon.com)
and Barnes & Noble (http://www.barnesandnoble.com). 35 Many associations of all
types now have their own Web sites with much more detailed information than that
found in widely used directories of associations such as Encyclopedia of Associations
. Elizabeth Thomsen suggests that librarians need to examine all areas of their
collections to make sure that they are still worth the time and money invested to maintain
them. 36 Reference librarians must determine whether such special collections as
vertical files, college catalogs, company annual reports, and telephone books can now
be replaced with access to resources available on the Web.
Rather than relying solely on search engines, which do not automatically differentiate
the authoritative sites from the rest, reference librarians can exercise the same
type of selectivity that they do in building physical reference collections by building
virtual collections. Librarians can develop special guides for users of their own libraries.
Once published on the Web, such guides are available to a much wider audience
as well. There is a growing body of literature providing guidance on developing and
revising such virtual reference collections. 37 The ipl2 Reference collection (listed as