BEYOND THE INTERNET: A Quick Tour of the hard-copy Reference Section
 at the Brighton Branch of the Boston Public Library
by Mark D. Trachtenberg

In this era of over-reliance on the computer, all too many students and other library users content themselves with punching up www.google.com and neglect the rich information resources which are available in the hard-copy reference section of any good branch library. The Brighton branch of the Boston Public Library, being the one closest to my home, is my favorite.

Google will probably have a listing for your hometown, but it won't have a comparison for where it ranks among various North American metropolitan areas on various measures of quality of life. For that you'll need to go to the hard-copy source, "The Places Rated Almanac."  In "The Places Rated Almanac" we find the reassuring news that Boston ranks second of 354 major and minor metropolitan areas for education, sixth in access to the arts, and 20th in transportation (we'd be first if we funded our public schools better, according to this reference work). However, if what you want most is good weather, you'd have to move to San Diego, California.

A fan of true-crime stories can find "The Encyclopedia of Modern Murder" and "The Encyclopedia of Organized Crime." The former tells the tale of Norman Mailer's ill-fated friendship with the prisoner-turned-writer Jack Abbott, who proved that literary talent does not equal readiness for release.  Abbott got out of prison with Mailer's help, but shortly thereafter killed a waiter during an argument in a restaurant (shortly before this incident, Abbott had called his literary agent because he didn't know where to buy toothpaste).  According to the "Encyclopedia of Modern Murder," William F. Buckley, Jr. made a similar mistake with a literary protégé. An internet search would be quite unlikely to turn up these stories.

For students of ethnic culture and history, the reference section of the Brighton branch of the Boston Public Library has at least four different African-American history encyclopedias, a similar work on Hispanic topics, and "The New Catholic Encyclopedia."  Along with biographies of various saints, the "New Catholic Encyclopedia has a long article about religious relics -- not something one would find on the internet. In the reference work about contemporary American authors, a library user can find not only a detailed critique of the novels of Isaac Asimov and Kurt Vonnegut, but also a list of every book-length critical commentary ever written about them.

In the category of general reference encyclopedias, the Brighton branch of the Boston Public Library offers its users the choice of the World Book Encyclopedia, the Encyclopedia Britannica, and the Encyclopedia Americana.  I find the Encyclopedia Britannica's division between "Macropedia" and "Micropedia” (short articles and in-depth ones) more annoying than helpful, so what I like to do is look up the same topic in the World Book Encyclopedia and the Encyclopedia Americana and lay them out on the table side by side.  The World Book has better illustrations and better coverage of recent American pop culture, but sometimes it misses details that the Encyclopedia Americana picks up.  If you look up the late U.S. president Warren G. Harding in the World Book, it won't tell you about his mistress, but the Encyclopedia Americana will.

I've barely scratched the surface.  There is an enormous wealth of not only information, but also sheer entertainment, available to library users in the hard-copy reference section of any decent branch library.  I hope that librarians can play a more active role in coaxing library users who have been conditioned to "Google it" to make more use of all this delicious material.

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