April 06, 2007

Favorite Reference Sources?

This is an informal poll, for the LIS crowd.

If you were stranded on a desert isle, and you were lucky enough to continue doing reference for your current constituents, what 5 reference sources would you want to have on hand? You're lucky enough to have both high-speed Internet access as well as a safe, climate-controlled space for up to 5 reference works. :-)

Mine?

- Statistical Abstract of the United States.
- The Statesman’s Year Book.
- Dorling Kindersley Ultimate Visual Dictionary.
- MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers (and its cousins, Turabian & the APA Style guide) not for favoriteness, necessarily, but definitely for usefulness.

And I reserve one player to be named later.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I'm not a real librarian yet, and I probably would have different answers if I had patrons actually asking me for help so I'm not really answering the poll question you asked. Anyway, here are my personal favorite reference sources to have with me on that desert island with internet access:

1. Benet's Reader's Encyclopedia (although this might get frustrating if I wanted to read some of the works mentioned here)
2. Holidays, Festivals and Celebrations of the World Dictionary (because I love holidays, and I could celebrate something every day)
3. The Internet Movie Database (hmm... possibly frustrating again - does the Desert Island have a TV, DVD player and DVD rentals?)
4. Wikipedia (I know it's not always reliable, but I still find it to be good and fun source)
5. I also think I would want a dictionary of some sort with me. How 'bout the Oxford English Dictionary? It's 20 volumes though. For a single volume, I'd pick The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language. Handy as they may be, online dictionaries just don't do it for me the way print ones do.

Well, those are 5 of my favorites, but if I had to write a paper (to e-mail in from the island), I'd be lost without the MLA Handbook. ;-)

maura said...

1. The Official ABMS Directory of Board Certified Medical Specialists
2. Reference USA Database
3. LexisNexis Corporate Affiliations
4. Chase's Calendar of Events
5. Statistical Abstract of the United States (even though it is online, I prefer to use the print)

(I figure since I have an internet connection, I'll have the free web at my disposal...)