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1Janndon
Hello, fellow library people! Recently, I've been thinking about my reference section and what to do with it. I have greatly downsized it over the past few years because there were a large number of materials that were irrelevant/outdated/inaccurate. Additionally, it has not been touched by a single student or staff member in the four years I've been there (I am a Teacher Librarian at a middle and high school of about 3200). Technology is capable of replacing the need for a reference section, and it is infinitely more vast, and less expensive, than anything I could purchase book-wise. My question is this: what do you think is the future of reference sections? Do you continue to purchase and maintain yours? Or are you more of the mind that money is better used on technology. I find it hard to simply not have a reference section anymore, but I can't rationalize spending money on it either. I honestly think the future of libraries does not include reference sections. Anyway, just trying to get a feel for what the rest of you are doing these days. Let me know what you guys think!
2mamzel
I have had to gut my reference section as well (public high school 1900 students) because they made major changes in the space and I lost a lot of shelves. I kept some with general interest (comics and music) and some with little/no Internet backup (Mexican states). A lot of the books I put into general circulation (like all the UXL encyclopedias). It broke my heart to get rid of all of them.
3RowanTribe
I'm in a US public branch library, service population about 3000, college town.
Our reference collection (currently about 200 volumes) has shrunk by about 3/4 over the 8 years that I've been here, and the few non-obviously-reference titles that remain are getting shifted gradually into the general nonfiction collection (adult and juvenile) where they are likewise untouched, and then weeded out for age.
What we're keeping and why:
Current year of the Almanac and the "Ripley's Believe it or Not" and the Guinness Book of World Records: these are 80+% of our reference uses.
Current "issues" of price guides and valuation books and Consumer Reports: people want the latest edition, and they often are checked out from general collections and not returned. Consumer Reports yearly "best of" books are probably 20% of our reference stats just by themselves.
Law books and local Codes of Ordinances and local tax and legal charter books: we're actually required to by our county to hold these as a public service.
Concordances and Atlases: they're enormous and expensive, and when they circulate they tend not to come back, so we prefer to have them here and relatively unused because they look good on the shelf.
Encyclopedia and WorldBook and College Blue Books: it looks bad for a library to NOT have these (yes, we literally keep buying them on a 5 year replacement schedule even though they haven't been touched in 8 years - so that our optics are good. People aren't rational, I know.)
Regular dictionaries: multiple brands to suit different preferences. They RARELY get used, and then mainly in the interest of an axe to grind or a particular phrasing desired for an assignment.
Foreign-language-to-English dictionaries: some people are weird and don't trust the internet or a particular dictionary, so we have multiple "brands" of translations to keep them happy. These DO get used.
We used to keep the Physicians Desk Reference, but that got unwieldy and was never used, so we switched over to a set of smaller medical dictionaries/encyclopedias that never get used but are at least easier on the wrists to shelf-read and dust.
Our reference collection (currently about 200 volumes) has shrunk by about 3/4 over the 8 years that I've been here, and the few non-obviously-reference titles that remain are getting shifted gradually into the general nonfiction collection (adult and juvenile) where they are likewise untouched, and then weeded out for age.
What we're keeping and why:
Current year of the Almanac and the "Ripley's Believe it or Not" and the Guinness Book of World Records: these are 80+% of our reference uses.
Current "issues" of price guides and valuation books and Consumer Reports: people want the latest edition, and they often are checked out from general collections and not returned. Consumer Reports yearly "best of" books are probably 20% of our reference stats just by themselves.
Law books and local Codes of Ordinances and local tax and legal charter books: we're actually required to by our county to hold these as a public service.
Concordances and Atlases: they're enormous and expensive, and when they circulate they tend not to come back, so we prefer to have them here and relatively unused because they look good on the shelf.
Encyclopedia and WorldBook and College Blue Books: it looks bad for a library to NOT have these (yes, we literally keep buying them on a 5 year replacement schedule even though they haven't been touched in 8 years - so that our optics are good. People aren't rational, I know.)
Regular dictionaries: multiple brands to suit different preferences. They RARELY get used, and then mainly in the interest of an axe to grind or a particular phrasing desired for an assignment.
Foreign-language-to-English dictionaries: some people are weird and don't trust the internet or a particular dictionary, so we have multiple "brands" of translations to keep them happy. These DO get used.
We used to keep the Physicians Desk Reference, but that got unwieldy and was never used, so we switched over to a set of smaller medical dictionaries/encyclopedias that never get used but are at least easier on the wrists to shelf-read and dust.
