Outstanding Academic Titles 2025: Reference

Enjoy this week's Outstanding Academic Titles list snippet: Five reference-related titles

Posted on May 29, 2026 in Outstanding Academic Titles

Enjoy these five selections from the Choice Reviews 2025 Outstanding Academic Titles list. This week, we highlight Outstanding Academic Titles that are reference-related. A hearty congratulations to the winning authors, editors, and publishers!

1. Serving the underserved: strategies for inclusive community engagement
ed. by Catharine Bomhold ALA Neal-Schuman, 2024

Bomhold (Univ. of Southern Mississippi), coauthor of Twice Upon a Time: A Guide to Fractured, Altered, and Retold Folk and Fairy Tales (2008) and Build It, Make It, Do It, Play It! Subject Access to the Best How-To Guides for Children and Teens (2014), assembles a team of experts to provide actionable strategies and curated resources for serving marginalized communities. Grounded in the belief that empowering oneself leads to empowering others, this guide urges library professionals to examine their practices and critically expand services to underserved populations. Serving the Underserved opens by discussing theories of information-seeking behavior across diverse populations while emphasizing the importance of intersectionality, highlighting how overlapping identities shape experiences and access to information. Subsequent chapters lay a foundation for understanding the unique challenges faced by refugee, immigrant, and international communities, among others; people experiencing homelessness; people with physical disabilities; people with mental health disorders or neurodiversity; LGBTQ+ youth; older adults; and incarcerated or formerly incarcerated people. Each chapter offers practical tools, including examples of effective programs and discussion questions ideal for professional learning networks, making it a valuable blueprint for fostering inclusivity. View on Amazon.

2. Reading the archival revolution: declassified stories and their challenges
Vatulescu, Cristina. Stanford, 2024

Archives remain enigmatic entities in academia. They are recognized as indispensable to research, but the things themselves – their structures, the purposes they are meant to serve, the ways to use them – receive little critical inquiry. This is especially true when it comes to Eastern Europe, where the culture of archives and their organizing schemes are notoriously tricky for non-natives to navigate. The challenges intensify again when confronting the subject of Vatulescu’s book: the “hostile” archives of Soviet-era secret police. These archives present a moral dilemma, for in them the privacy of individuals targeted for persecution and often, extermination, is invaded. Embracing the gravity of the situation, Vatulescu (New York Univ.) proposes, and demonstrates through case studies, methods for reading these archival documents more holistically and humanely. She recommends strategies for interpreting archival gaps and silences, for using adjacent files to make inferences about individuals, and for reading both “with” and “against the grain” of the archive. Similarly, Vatulescu stresses the “embodied” experience of archival work and consequently encourages users to engage mindfully with the different media that might be in a file and to develop a practice of “affective” reading. Her book is a triumph. Crucial reading for archivists, information professionals, and researchers alike.  View on Amazon.

3. Cultural humility in libraries: a call to action and strategies for success
ed. by Shannon D. Jones and Beverly Murphy Rowman & Littlefield, 2024

Cultural Humility in Libraries packs a lot of information in a slim volume. Divided into three sections, the first explores cultural humility, what it is, its role in history, how it differs from cultural competence, and its role in both health care and health literacy. As with many other aspects of being human, developing cultural humility is a lifelong process that forces us to look inside ourselves and analyze our beliefs and biases. This is especially important in healthcare where, on a daily basis, we treat and interact with patients with a broad variety of cultural and belief patterns that are frequently different from our own. The second section focuses on cultural humility in libraries and how it can affect not only face-to-face encounters with students, patients, and providers, but also librarian practices regarding literature searches and systematic review searches for their clients. The third section shares stories from various voices, some frequently silenced, others not so much. Perspectives on cultural humility from the viewpoint of a white cis-woman, a Black man, a trans person, a refugee, a disabled individual, and others are clearly written and extremely eye-opening. This book is a must read for anyone in the library profession. View on Amazon.  

4. Teen runaways in America: a reference handbook
Wakin, Michele. Bloomsbury Academic, 2025

Teen Runaways in America is a dynamic reference handbook in the “Contemporary World Issues” series, covering the history and elements of runaway status in the US. Wakin (sociology, Bridgewater State Univ.) provides an in-depth look at the demographics of teen runaways as well as the social and legal dimensions of this phenomenon. The book removes the mystery associated with teen runaways and offers a description of key risk factors. As Waking shows, runaway youth come from all parts of society; there is no one composite of a typical runaway. The descriptors run the gamut. One of the book’s major strengths is the knowledge and resources it provides regarding the agencies that serve this population. Many of these organizations aid a large number of youth through shelters and social service programs. Key to their holistic services is rescuing youth from abuse, neglect, prostitution, and trafficking. This book has a library of answers to the mystery of teen runaways, making it a must-have for any organization seeking to assist youths facing homelessness and an unstable family life. View on Amazon.

5. Frederick Douglass: a life in American history
Christian, Mark. ABC-CLIO, 2025

In this thought-provoking biography of Frederick Douglass, deliberately “written with a provocative edge” (p. 29) from an Africana/Black studies paradigm, Christian (CUNY) provides “a truly insightful journey into the labyrinth of American history” (p. 196). The work is replete with the ironies, contradictions, hypocrisies, and double standards that have characterized African American experiences in an America that boasts of upholding human freedom, liberty, and “inalienable rights” (p. 78). The book draws on many primary sources to explore Douglass’s views on diverse topics such as the “horrors of enslavement,” the danger of pseudoscientific racism, British racism, the Founding Fathers’ checkered legacy, the colonial interpretation of Christianity, abolition, social justice, women’s empowerment, interracial marriage, the values of education, tokenism, and first-class citizenship (p. 96). Christian traces the current superiority complex manifested by racist whites back to the brutalities inflicted on African bodies during enslavement. While juxtaposing African Americans’ trauma, oppression, and exploitation against the forces of resistance, resilience, and survival, he fills a lacuna for African American history scholars and enthusiasts by chronologically contextualizing his analysis. Christian stresses the importance of speaking truth to power and underscores collective vigilance and caution among African Americans as “the war for true liberty and the pursuit of happiness continue[s]” (p. 164).  

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