Reference works

Reference works are published, i.e. generally distributed, printed materials, microforms, computer forms (diskettes, tapes, etc), audio tapes, films and video tapes, and unpublished but on-line computer source data provided for subscriber access. The essential characteristics of reference data are their authority, completeness, accuracy, timeliness or currency, and their organization into logical structures accessible by retrieval codes according to their characteristics, viz. subject, source or author(s), and publishers, chronology or accession, collection or location, language, country, political or economic bloc, etc. The retrieval system includes alphabetization within such characteristics and frequently selective key-word rotation and thesaurus techniques to achieve a desired redundancy or depth of indexing. Reference collections in physical or electronic storage may therefore be encumbered by complex accessing and cataloging techniques that slow entry of new data into the system and slow and multiply error condition possibilities in retrieval and physical storage.