The Zombie Stack Exchanges That Just Won't Die
Can anyone suggest good resources for selecting books to purchase for a medium-sized public library about computing? I have a reasonably good knowledge of the subject and have an impression of what's important and what the community might like, but I was curious if there were recent canonical lists of good books to have in this area. Thank you!
paracaudex
Is one way to think of it that you subscribe to all online access to all books in certain series or from certain publishers, for example Safari Books Online from O'Reilly? Ebook collections make it easy to provide access to the latest things, and also mean old books don't need to be weeded, though that can be a problem when people need a good book about WordPerfect 5.0 or the like.
The ACM maintains an eBook catalog for their subscribers, covering recent print+electronic titles from many publishers.
Computer stuff changes so fast, I don't know if canonical is possible. However, when I am trying to develop a part of the collection, one thing I do is look to see what other libraries have:
Go to the World Catalog and do an advanced search (http://www.worldcat.org/advancedsearch/).
Search for dd:004* as a keyword, and limit your publication dates (maybe 2010-2012) and your format (books). This will give you all the books with Dewey Decimal classification in the 004s published since 2010 sorted by relevance.
Scroll through to see what looks like it would be appropriate for your community.
Repeat for the 005s and the 006s to see the rest of the computer stuff.
You can sort by date if you want to see what is newest or limit yourself to just 2012.
You can add other keywords if you want to see something in particular (like iPad or networks).
You can also add more digits to your dd: search to narrow your results (dd:005.13* will give you books on programming languages, for example).
If you have access to FirstSearch (another interface for searching the World Catalog which requires a password), you can sort by number of libraries rather than relevance. I do not know what algorithm OCLC uses to establish relevance, but a list sorted by relevance is similar to the one sorted by number of libraries, so number of libraries is part of the equation. I think the open version rolls multiple editions of a title into one record.
This trick will work for other areas of Dewey Decimal of course, but note that your dd: input must be at least 3 digits. So searching for dd:33* will not give you all of economics. And if you leave off the asterisk, you will not get results that are cataloged with digits behind the decimal (so dd:005 will only give you items with exactly 005 in the record, where dd:005* will give you 005, 005.1, 005.74, etc.)
If you are in acquisitions, your jobber probably also has helpful lists. For example, we order most of our books from Ingram, and I can see a list of the top 200 books for the past year for Dewey 000s (or the top 50 for the last quarter). I can also browse by BISAC category or Dewey number sorted by publication date (not a testament to the quality, though sometimes reviews or review citations are available in the item record).