The Best Books for Academic Libraries

BBfAL hopes to fill the void left as Books for College Libraries, 3rd edition (1988) fails to see a fourth edition. It will be 10 volumes (plus CD-ROM) when completed in July 2003, with supplementary volumes to follow, plans for a website (access included with set purchase), and plans for a service that will electronically compare library holdings to the BBfAL database. A total of approximately 80,000 books will be cited entries consisting of standard CIP data, arranged by LC classification. The volumes are to be sold individually or as a set. Volume 1 has about 7,000 entries (about 12-20 per page in a legible, two-column format), beginning with LC classification Q (Science, General), bypassing classification R (Medicine), and continuing through to TX. Indexing is by author and title. Here is some background on this ambitious project from its editor: "The Best Books, Inc. began as a reprint publisher, and has been building our database of academic titles for over 20 years. In that time, we have consulted subject bibliographies, leading book review journals, and various subject librarians who helped determine titles that were most beneficial for both college and university libraries building their collections. We created this database to determine which books to reprint, which is our primary business, and The Best Books research project stemmed from there. The current Best Books for Academic Libraries project was developed to match our database with the knowledge of subject librarians from around the country. We enlisted their assistance with selecting the best books from our database (by LC Classification Schedule) and updating our current book list to represent the most recommended titles on every subject. In each case, we default to the recommendations of these area experts and encourage them to supply retrospectively omitted titles whenever possible. Our goal for The Best Books for Academic Libraries is to reach college libraries without the benefit of subject librarians and provide them with a research tool that will enable them to build their collections." Annotation (c) Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)