14 REFERENCE SOURCES
Now, as ipl2: Information You Can Trust, the IPL and the LII have been combined
to form a website offering an array of resources and services (www.ipl2.org)
that are definitely worth a look.
Most of this chapter has been devoted to discussing helpful and useful
sources for locating reputable, free, and high-quality websites. As I’ve men-
tioned previously, many reference sources are available as web-based products.
Most are fee-based, so in addition to the various criteria for selection already
discussed, the issue of pricing needs to be considered. Unlike printed refer-
ence works, for which there is a one-time fee (price), web-based products
usually involve licensing agreements of some kind in which the actual price
paid may depend on the number of users in a library’s service area, the num-
ber of full-time equivalent students at the institution, and so on. Since 1999,
The Charleston Advisor (TCA; http://www.charlestonco.com) has provided critical
reviews of web-based electronic resources. Both free and fee-based sources
are included; for example, the April 2008 issue of TCA includes reviews of
Reference USA, Book Review Digest Plus and Book Review Digest Retrospective, and
Value Line Research Center (all fee-based), as well as of the Consumer Action Web
Site, World Cat, and The International Dunhuang Project: The Silk Road Online,
all freely accessible. The reviews are written by library and other information
professionals andtips for keeping up with the wide world of the Internet:y Look at your own library’s website or those of other libraries. There are a
variety of approaches to website design and function.
y Subscribe to the Scout Report. The weekly updates are a welcome addition to
anyone’s e-mail in-box.
y Read the professional literature, including The Charleston Advisor, Reference
Books Bulletin, Choice, RUSQ, and Library Journal, for reviews of new
websites and web-based sources as well as reconsiderations of familiar ones.
y Explore some of our national cyber treasures, such as the websites of the
Library of Congress (www.loc.gov) and the Smithsonian Institution (www
.smithsonian.org).
y Browse newspapers on the Web: local, national, and international. As print
sales decline, most news organizations are putting more emphasis on their
web content.http://www.ebook3000.com