Desk Set

Ready Reference for the Digital Librarian

Welcome to Desk Set, intended as ready reference for today's librarian. We chose the works listed on these pages according to several criteria, such as the quality of the material or the credibility of the source. Some of the works listed here are included simply because they seemed so cool. We hope that you may find them all useful.

Reference librarians have maintained their private selection of ready reference works for a century or more. In fact, the same year that Samuel Green was writing for the first edition of Library Journal, Librarian of Congress Ainsworth Spofford was inditing a 25-page list of the books that every well-stocked ready reference collection should include.

By 1957, librarians were already predicting that reference work would be revolutionized by automation, but it wasn't until the seventies that on-line databases started to become available. In 1982, it was confidently suggested that "every good-size reference department will have its own microcomputer for ready reference and word processing" (Singer, 2010).

Who knows what ready reference works will look like in another thirty years? Only one thing is certain: people will still be asking the reference librarian all kinds of unusual questions!

Singer, C. A. (2010). Ready reference collections: A history. Reference & User Services Quarterly, 49(3), 253-64.