As you may know, Treasure Hunt Towers shares premises with Marylebone Library, and we’ve been helping the staff in the Information Service to build up a pile of books for a good bonfire. After all, what’s the point of them? They age faster than a superannuated Spice Girl, and the stuff in them is out of date before the ink is dry. As I splash the paraffin about, I’ll go through a few of them, explaining why they won’t be missed.Toss them on the pile
This is a good one – The Oxford English Dictionary, published before many of our readers were born, and updated with a few measly supplements. What sort of a way is that to keep up to date with the language? You’re far better off with the online version, which was last revised three weeks ago!
Here’s another multi-volume white elephant from Oxford, the Dictionary of National Biography. Nice to hold, well produced, I’ll give you that. But rather a lot of notable people have died since 2000, and some of us might have passed gently on waiting for the updates if it weren’t for the online version. This has admittedly not been updated since May – shock! horror! – but that was a pretty impressive update, with 87 new biographies (mostly of people who died in 2005), together with loads of corrections and additions.
We’ve been filling the smaller spaces on the bonfire with these one-volume dictionaries and handbooks – look, hundreds of them. No tears to be shed over any of them. Not only are they frequently updated online, they’re also collected together in mega-databases, like Credo Reference, Gale Virtual Reference and Oxford Reference Online. Which of course means that one search covers the lot. So you get quick service while we build up our flammable pile.
While we’re talking about reference books, these Encyclopedia Britannica volumes are bulking up the bonfire very nicely. Who will miss them? Where’s the multimedia? Where are the links and the slide-shows? Online of course. Now, what else shall we add to the blaze?
First-rate fuel
Things are really starting to hot up now. These old Grove Music and Grove Art tomes should really make our conflagration visible from space. Both of them have been made obsolete by – again – Oxford, who’ve renamed them Oxford Music and Oxford Art, and of course added lots more content and brought them bang up to date.
Don’t just stand there – pass me those Who’s Whos and that pile of newspapers. Then we’ll start on the directories. What? Oh yes, they’re all in KnowUK, so we can get rid of the lot. What else? Any more useless paper for our lovely, lovely bonfire?
[At this point, gentle reader, the author of the above words was led away, while the books were retrieved from the pile, rinsed of paraffin, and returned to the shelves, where they will be available for reference as soon as they have dried out. Rest assured that we recognise the continuing need for hard-copy as well as online sources of information, and we have no intention of allowing any bonfire of our books. Still, makes you think, doesn’t it?]
(Many of the links in the Gateway to websites are to Exclusive Resources for Westminster Libraries members. Outside a Westminster library, you will need to enter your library card number to get free access to the resource.)
No books were harmed in the composition of this message.
