Award
Every year the American Library Association’s Choice Reviews selects a limited number of books to be honored as Outstanding Academic Titles for that year. I am pleased to announce the The Art of Invention was selected as an Outstanding Academic Title for 2011. The award is described below with a link to the Choice Reviews website:
The Best of the Best
. Choice, v.49, no. 05, January 2012.
This issue of Choice contains our most eagerly awaited feature, the Outstanding Academic Titles list. This year’s list, Outstanding Academic Titles, 2011, includes 629 print and electronic titles selected by the Choice editors from among the 7,264 titles reviewed by Choice during calendar 2011. Comprising less than 9 percent of the titles reviewed during 2011 and 2.5 percent of those submitted during that same time span, these exceptional titles are truly the “best of the best.”
Outstanding Academic Titles
Every year in the January issue, Choice publishes a list of Outstanding Academic Titles that were reviewed during the previous calendar year. This prestigious list reflects the best in scholarly titles reviewed by Choice and brings with it the extraordinary recognition of the academic library community.
The list is quite selective: it contains approximately ten percent of some 7,000 works reviewed in Choice each year. Choice editors base their selections on the reviewer’s evaluation of the work, the editor’s knowledge of the field, and the reviewer’s record. The list was known as Outstanding Academic Books until 2000. The new name reflects an increase in reviews of electronic products and Internet sites.
In awarding Outstanding Academic Titles, the editors apply several criteria to reviewed titles:
- overall excellence in presentation and scholarship
- importance relative to other literature in the field
- distinction as a first treatment of a given subject in book or electronic form
- originality or uniqueness of treatment
- value to undergraduate students
- importance in building undergraduate library collections
The list cites only bibliographic information. The number and publication issue of the Choice review are also provided, to assist readers wishing detailed evaluations of the titles. In addition, Choice Reviews Online tags all reviews that have been designated as Outstanding Academic Titles.
About Choice
Choice: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries is the premier source for reviews of academic books, electronic media, and Internet resources of interest to those in higher education. More than 35,000 librarians, faculty, and key decision makers rely on Choice magazine and Choice Reviews Online for collection development and scholarly research. Choice reaches almost every undergraduate college and university library in the United States. For more information click on the Choice Reviews link: http://www.choice360.org/librarianship/outstanding-academic-titles