About Guide to Reference

Your Source of First Resort

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The new edition of ALA Editions’ Guide to Reference Books, to be called Guide to Reference (GR) in order to denote its format neutrality, traces its roots to 1902 and the publication of Alice Bertha Kroeger’s (Drexel University) Guide to the Study and Use of Reference Books: A Manual for Librarians, Teachers and Students.¹

Part textbook, part vademecum, part bibliography, part canon, GR has become a cornerstone of the literature of librarianship. It has been used throughout North America and been sold internationally as the “source of first resort” for identifying local materials that will answer users’ questions, training reference staff in the repertory of works with which they should be familiar, inventorying and developing reference collections, enabling interlibrary loan staff to identify sources that will verify items requested, and serving as a gateway to the wider repertory of the reference literature.

After Kroeger’s death, the Guide became a project of the General Reference Department of Columbia University under compilers and editors Isadore Gilbert Mudge, Constance Winchell, and Eugene Sheehy. The General Editorship passed for the 10th edition supplement and the 11th edition to Robert Balay of the Association of College and Research Libraries’ Choice magazine. During the course of its history, the Guide has become an increasingly cooperative project as the reference literature has grown and as contributors have been drawn from libraries around the country.

This new edition was announced in May 2000. It will in effect be the centennial edition; it will be the first to list sources on the World Wide Web and the first to be issued in electronic form. Although to many the Guide is easier to use in printed form, the new edition will take full advantage of the Web's capacities to connect information sources; released from the constraints of a physical volume, it will also create and link to content that will make it a center for learning about and practicing reference librarianships.²

1. See the “Publication History” in Stuart W. Miller’s “‘Monument’: Guide to Reference Books” in Distinguished Classics of Reference Publishing (James Rettig, ed. Phoenix, AZ: Oryx Press, 1992, 129–37).
   
2. See Robert H. Kieft, “When Reference Works Are Not Books: The New Edition of the Guide to Reference Books” (RUSQ 41:4 [Summer 2002]; 330–34) for views about how the Guide might develop. Since the publication of that article, many more possibilities have arisen with the development of new technologies and in discussion with librarians