Topic summary
Reference book
Extracted from the Wikipedia article Reference work.
Library reference book
In many public and academic libraries, reference books are not available for borrowing. Reference books may be consulted frequently, such as dictionaries or atlases, or very rarely, like a highly specialized concordance. Because some reference books are in constant demand while others are used so infrequently that replacement would be difficult, they may be kept on-site and made available for photocopying or digital scanning instead of checkout.