Just the facts: reference works on African Americans are foundations of a good home library.

IF I COULD CHOOSE BETWEEN MY HUMBLE Brooklyn digs and one of the celebrity homes featured on MTV Cribs, I'd gladly take the 14-room mansion with guest house and multicar garage, thank you very much--but on one condition. They'd have to build me a library and stock it. When was the last time you saw a book, let alone a bookshelf or a library in any of those fabulous residences?

If you were to go byMTV Cribs, you might walk away with the impression that books are illegal in the United States. But books are not illegal, thank goodness. And while I wish my apartment were grander, I'll settle for the four hand-me-down, floor-to-ceiling shelves crammed with books and periodicals that dominate my living room/dining room/art studio/parlor/den--well, you get the picture--any day.

Those battered shelves, of which I am very proud, constitute my library, and no home is complete without one.

Now a library need not be a fancy affair. The gilded and leather-bound complete works of William Shakespeare and autographed, first-edition hardcovers by your favorite authors, while nice additions, are not requisites. In fact, the cornerstone of a good library is one of the most fundamental and often overlooked of all texts: the dictionary. Buttress this with essential research and reference materials such as an encyclopedia, literary anthologies and historical collections, and you have a strong and valuable foundation.

In additional to general reference works, African American readers, students, teachers, university scholars and writers need works that compile information on the people, issues and subjects particular to the black Diaspora. Fortunately, offerings on those topics are becoming more numerous and comprehensive.

Need a little help getting started? The following texts--several recently of them published--will help build or enhance own library, not to mention give you a leg up on the bibliophobic rich and famous.

When Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience (Basic Civitas Books) was first published in 1999, the weighty "incomparable, one-volume encyclopedia of the black world" was indeed an invaluable resource for educators, students and families. The landmark book, inspired by the dream of the great scholar W.E.B. Du Bois, was filled with so much information on the many aspects of black culture--including major cultural, political and religious figures and movements--that it was sometimes impossible to close once opened. Now editors Kwame Anthony Appiah and Henry Louis Gates Jr. have expanded their project with a second edition.

The new Africana (Oxford University Press, June 2005) is a five-volume set with more than 1,000 brand-new entries, as well as revised and updated entries accompanying the many biographies, maps and photographs, making this one of the most authoritative reference books ever written on the African experience.

The second edition of Black Women in America, Volumes I, II and III (Oxford University Press, June 2005) is also an updated version of a previously published reference collection. As with Black Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia, which was first published in 1993 (Carlson Publishing, Inc.) and in 1994 (Indiana University Press, now out of print), Darlene Clark Hine, editor-in-chief, and the contributing editors pull together and acknowledge the significant contributions made by African American women such as Marian Anderson, Charlayne Hunter-Gault Maxine Waters and Ida B. Wells-Barnett.

The Encyclopedia of African American Society (Sage Publications, March 2005) is a two-volume set that includes a list of black athletes in the sports of Hall of Fame, and covers topics such as fine arts, movements and events, religion and beliefs, and politics and policies, as they gave rise to today's African American society.

Touted as the most comprehensive biography of African Americans published in decades, African American Lives (Oxford University Press, 2004) delivers well-researched accounts of more than 600 men and women who have significantly shaped the myriad experiences of blacks in America during the past four centuries.

African American Lives includes such important figures as Esteban, an early African explorer who journeyed to North America in 1528, and ranges from the usual suspects such as El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz and Martin Luther King Jr. to contemporary world-class athletes like Muhammad Ali and Venus and Serena Williams.

African American Lives will help fill in all those gaping omissions glossed over in United States history class. Edited by Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, is a 1,000-plus-page tome, complete with 300 illustrations and photographs. Oxford also has in the works its African American National Biography, modeled after the American National Biography, which will be an eight-volume repository of more than 8,000 life stories of African Americans and is scheduled to be published in 2008.

Inventor Henry T. Sampson chronicles the historical contributions of blacks to the broadcasting industry in Swingin' on the Etherwaves: A Chronological History of African Americans in Radio and Television Broadcasting, 1925-1955 (Scarecrow Press, July 2005). This work covers early radio and television appearances and documents the impact of blacks' entertainment styles on programming. The two-volume hardcover also includes nearly 250 black-and-white photographs.

The African-American Archive: The History of the Black Experience Through Documents, edited by Kai Wright (Black Dog & Leventhal Publishers, Inc., 2001), is a rare find and contains hundreds of historical documents culled from the 16th to the 21st centuries.

Found in a single volume are transcripts of slave narratives and speeches from great orators such as Sojourner Truth ("Ain't I a Woman?"), Frederick Douglass ("What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?"), Thurgood Marshall (Brown v. Board of Education arguments) and Louis Farrakhan (his speech at the Million Man March).

African-American Archive also includes letters from black soldiers who fought in the Civil War; a draft of Thomas Jefferson's Declaration of Independence; Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation; and excerpts from the works of great poets and writers such as Phillis Wheatley and Ralph Ellison.

As its title suggests, Black Heroes (Omnigraphics, 2004) is a compendium of 150 biographies and photographs of outstanding people of African descent who made great accomplishments. Shepherded into existence by one of the true gatekeepers of our cultural legacies, Jessie Carney Smith, Fisk University librarian, professor and author, and featuring a Foreword by renowned poet and activist Nikki Giovanni, Black Heroes focuses on the contributions of men and women of the 20th century, including Maya Angelou, Josephine Baker, Romare Bearden, W.E.B. Du Bois, Colin Powell and Andrew Young.

A glossary of Harlem Renaissance slang, maps, lists of contemporary museums with collections of works from the period, and photographs flesh out the alphabetically arranged entries of the various artists, intellectuals, books, journals, writers, organizations, collectives, locales and events that make up the Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance (Checkmark Books, 2003). Such entries as those on the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, the Great Migration, Zora Neale Hurston, the National Urban League, Charlie Parker, the Universal Negro Improvement Association make this the only encyclopedia dedicated solely to black America's golden age of cultural productivity in the 1920s and '30s.

Another book on the Harlem Renaissance, bearing the same title, the Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance (edited by Cary D. Wintz and Paul Finkelman [Routledge, 2004]), also focuses on this legacy, and features a street map of Harlem (1913-1930), as well as coverage of the writers, patrons, musicians and politicians of that memorable era.

With a Foreword by Myrlie Evers-Williams, former NAACP chairwoman and widow of slain civil rights leader Medger Evers, Civil Rights Chronicle: The African-American Struggle for Freedom (Legacy Publishing/Publications International, Ltd., 2003) is a thorough historical book that highlights the years that defined the Civil Rights Movement: the decades from 1940 to 1975. First-person accounts, information-packed sidebars and timelines, critical essays on movement leaders, civil rights organizations, groundbreaking legal rulings and political developments and nearly 1000 photographs, movie posters, bookcovers and illustrations chronicle the fight for freedom and equality waged by blacks in America from the 15th-century slave trade to the present.

Zakia Carter is a writer and editor. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.

For an expanded listing of reference books, log on to www.bibookreview.com.