The Digital Reference Collection in Academic Libraries (original) (raw)
Reference services and reference collections in academic libraries are going through significant changes. In this paper, some of the issues prevalent today in building and maintaining digital reference collections will be discussed, such as: presentation and organization, marketing, use, and selection of digital reference resources. Closing the books In March 2012, a few days before the Illinois Association of College and Research Libraries (IACRL) took place the news about Encyclopedia Britannica stopping the print edition was announced by major academic and popular media outlets. Joab Jackson (2012) from ComputerWorld was one of many to report how the world-renown Encyclopedia Britannica, after 244 years, would change their publication to only and entirely digital. An online edition had been published parallel to the print edition for some time, but the market forces and users' adaptation to digital formats were decisive for the encyclopedia, first published in one volume in 1768 (twenty-one years before the beginning of the French Revolution). Although this move was not a surprise, academic publishers are rapidly converting their traditional reference paper collections into digital products and creating new ones.