Reference Services Review: Volume 19 Issue 1

When bad is good enough: The lowest common denominator in reference publishing and reviewing

David Henige

It does not seem too much to argue that high quality reference works, always crucial to the effective pursuit of research, have become increasingly important with the continuing…

The North Carolina State University Libraries and the National Agricultural Library joint project on Transmission of Digitized Text: Improving access to agricultural information

Tracy M. Casorso

The National Agricultural Library (NAL), the North Carolina State University(NCSU) Libraries, and the NCSU Computing Center are collaborating on a research and demonstration…

Official state lists of endangered, threatened, or rare species

Rebecca L. Gardner, Jeanne E. Boyle, Ellen Calhoun

Following enactment of the federal Endangered Species Act in 1973, a variety of organizations proceeded to establish lists of endangered, threatened, or rare species of wildlife…

Assessment of a Hypercard Program at Penrose Library, The University of Denver

Virginia Tschanz

Penrose Tutorial and Guides, a HyperCard (hypertext) program designed to provide computer‐assisted reference service, was created by the author in the summer of 1989. Development…

Monitoring user search success through transaction log analysis: The Wolfpac example

Steven D. Zink

It is common knowledge that public card catalogs in libraries have been poorly understood and inefficiently utilized by a large portion of their searchers. The myriad reasons for…

The human relations area files and cross‐cultural CD: Enhanced access to selected subjects

Ellen D. Sutton

In the fall of 1989, SilverPlatter and Human Relations Area Files, Inc. began releasing their new series Cross‐Cultural CD, based on a subset of the Human Relations Area Files…

Reference librarian of the future

Ilene F. Rockman, Virginia Massey‐Burzio, Alan Ritch, Steven D. Zink, Martha L. Hale

Economist John Kenneth Galbraith was once quoted as saying, “There are two types of economists—those who don't know the future, and those who don't know they don't know.” The same…

MLA on CD‐ROM: End‐Users respond

Jo McClamroch, Linda Lawrence Stein, Edgar Williamson

The MLA International Bibliography is well known as one of the primary indexes in the humanities. Published annually by the Modern Language Association of America, it provides…

Value‐added bibliographic instruction: Teaching students to find the right citations

Stan Nash, Myoung Chung Wilson

The inability of college‐educated men and women to find and utilize information relevant to a given problem has become a matter of increasing concern to librarians and others…