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The World Wide Web (WWW) has become the most visible application of the Internet. Newspapers and popular magazines publish stories on a regular basis about Web sites. The most ubiquitous symbols of the World Wide Web, its Uniform Resource Locator (URL) addresses, are even becoming commonplace on many television commercials. Over the past few years the World Wide Web (along with client applications like Netscape to assist in navigating the Web) has literally brought the Internet to life and to the attention of the general public.

It is common knowledge that public card catalogs in libraries have been poorly understood and inefficiently utilized by a large portion of their searchers. The myriad reasons for this situation range from the complicated nature of card filing rules to poor or total lack of understanding of assigned subject headings on the part of users. The emergence of automated online public access catalogs was initially seen as a means of overcoming this pattern of poor utilization. Instead, their widespread adoption has often transferred ineffective user searching behavior to an electronic environment.

There is very likely a place in your library that is far outside your control as a collection development librarian. From all appearances, the materials in this place are relatively unused, contain a great deal of obsolete or ephemeral material in need of weeding, and worst of all are probably growing in such an unchecked manner that they may outnumber the volumes in your monograph collection. The librarians that work there may even seem a little different—discussing agencies of the federal government with startling familiarity and incomprehensible glee. This place, of course, is your government publications department.

In the past few years, as budgets have tightened and available shelving space has diminished, U.S. government documents librarians have for the first time given serious consideration to formulating collection development policies and to carefully scrutinizing their expenditures as well as their collections. In the process of evaluating its collection and in an effort to make better use of available funding, the Government Publications Department of the University of Nevada‐Reno (a regional depository with a collection exceeding one million documents) undertook a study to determine if the Department could justify canceling its subscription to the Readex Microprint collection of non‐depository titles represented in the Monthly Catalog of United States Government Publications.

Economist John Kenneth Galbraith was once quoted as saying, “There are two types of economists—those who don't know the future, and those who don't know they don't know.” The same can be said for librarians.

The federal government is frequently described as being the greatest information producer (in volume, if nothing else) in the world. Yet, the fact is often ignored that the federal government, as an entity, is one of the world's greatest information consumers. Its concerns are great and far‐reaching; many societal problems are on the cutting edge of research, and all possible forces are brought to bear in addressing them. It is not surprising that the federal government frequently finds a large body of literature which must be synthesized and be made available for immediate use in a convenient form. To meet these needs, the U.S. government has developed indices to the scholarly and research literature in fields with which it is intimately involved: labor, wildlife, environment, energy, and so forth. Perhaps the best known products of these efforts are the Bibliography of Agriculture and Index Medicus.

Imagine you are working at the reference desk of a major university library on a busy weekday afternoon. As you say, “How may I help you?” to your next client, you notice that he is wearing a high school letterman's jacket and is sporting fuzz on his upper lip that he would proudly call a mustache.

The United States government is the world's largest publisher. Its presses churn out thousands of items annually, covering every conceivable subject. Even though most of the items deal with present day concerns, the United States government is responsible for the publication of a large number of histories. Unfortunately, these works, with the possible exception of the Department of Defense's Military History Series, have received little exposure and limited use. In an effort to bring this valuable resource to light, the following bibliography presents annotated citations to nearly 150 histories published from mid‐1977 through mid‐1979.

This index accompanies the index that appeared in Reference Services Review 16:4 (1988). As noted in the introduction to that index, the articles in RSR that deal with specific reference titles can be grouped into two categories: those that review specific titles (to a maximum of three) and those that review titles pertinent to a specific subject or discipline. The index in RSR 16:4 covered the first category; it indexed, by title, all titles that had been reviewed in the “Reference Serials” and the “Landmarks of Reference” columns, as well as selected titles from the “Indexes and Indexers,” “Government Publications,” and “Special Feature” columns of the journal.