| dc.description.abstract | Many years ago, when I started out on a library
career, I was introduced to Walford's Guide and
used it often to answer mo t of the questions posed
by my teacher when I did my library assistant's
course. It was called a 'single-book library' by
library users in those days, but then I am going
back to the days before Google, Windows or even
computers in libraries.
Now that I am a fully qualified chartered librarian
I wonder at the value of such a printed tome in this
digital age of instant information at your fingertips.
The World Wide Web revolutionized the way
we search for information, and perhaps few people
take the trouble to critically appraise the sites they
visit and reference.
However, the beauty of this book is the simplicity
of design and layout which can be accessed far
more quickly than opening a search engine and
typing in a nebulous term.
The contents page is a clear and concise listing
of the subject groupings under which the contents
are organized. There is a useful quick-start guide
with a comprehensive description of an example
entry. There is also a list of contributors in
case you feel the need to complain of omissions,
and there are some notable omissions amongst the
8000+ resources. However, many of the best resources
(including Google) are referenced in this guide.
The introduction gives a neat diagram of the
'Information Universe' and there are two indexes,
a topic-based index with more than 1000 entries
and a title/author index, making searching the
contents very straightforward.
Using the same subject groupings as the contents
page there are 'SO good websites to try first', but it
does mention in the Introduction that websites are
sometimes restricted or denied to some users. The
preface tells us that all the URLs were checked
in April 2005, which, because of the evanescent
nature of some websites, is extremely useful.
The content under the websites' Medicine section
includes some American sites but totally ignores
the National Library for Health in the UK and the
equivalent in the USA. It does mention Bandolier
and the National Institute for Health and Clinical
Excellence.
Despite the shortcomings of trying to list all the
resources available in one volume, The new Walford
is very much a book for all libraries and a must for
general research.
It is a fine display of the knowledge and expertise
with which librarians can search for, identify
and retrieve specialist information, and a needed
starting point for novice researchers.
The entries are cross indexed with references
and commonly used abbreviations and acronyms,
and this encourages readers to turn the pages,
allowing serendipity to show interesting and often
unknown resources.
Google may be an excellent search engine but
there is no way it could produce such a listing of
appraised quality resources, in a concise format, in
one session of searching from the keyboard.
This book has tried to use resources from everywhere
but the bulk of entries come from the UK
and the USA, with a scattering of international
organizations such as the World Health Organization
and UNESCO.
Most publishers mentioned are multi-national,
but again the content is chiefly from the UK or
USA. I did find a mention of a textbook, translated
from the Greek, on railway infrastructure which
describes European railway practices which are
not usually mentioned in British texts! Fascinating
thing-serendi pi ty. | en_US |
