A faculty member recently remarked to a colleague of mine that it seemed like more and more special subject encyclopedias were being published, and the faculty members was questioning the value and quality of many of these. It would be interesting to see actual statistics on the numbers of such encyclopedias—does anyone know if any such numbers exist? And certainly a great many of them are valuable. When I compare the wealth of subject encyclopedias available today with what was available twenty years ago, I know that it’s much, much easier to find the kind of authoritative background information that they can provide (this without even considering the ease of electronic access to many of these titles). That said, it does sometimes seem as if there are many duplicative titles, or titles whose creation seems to have been driven by a publisher’s marketing department. Some have evidence of being produced hastily; I read of one instance where the editor of such a volume posted corrections on his Web site because the publisher hadn’t allowed time for proper editing and fact-checking. What are other’s perceptions of this phenomenon, and how do we separate the wheat from the chaff?
The Official News of the ALA's Reference and User Services Association
I have tried for some time now to convince publishers that these encyclopedias have become like rabbits and no one can afford the cost of having very many and even if we buy them in print “no one will come to the library to use them”—they don't do very well with the old dust layer test.
Diana