Reva Basch is a writer, editor and and consultant to the online industry.  Prior to starting her own business in 1986, she was Vice President and Director of Research at Information on Demand, a pioneering independent research company based in Berkeley, CA. She has designed front-end search software for major online services, written and consulted on technical, marketing and training issues for both online services and database producers, and published extensively in information industry journals. She has keynoted at international conferences in Australia, Scandinavia and the United Kingdom, as well as Canada and the U.S.

    

Reva won the 1990 UMI/Data Courier Writing Award for her two-part article on the user "wish list" in Online magazine. She was the 1993 recipient of the Dun and Bradstreet Online Champion Award. She is author of four books: Researching Online For Dummies (Hungry Minds, 2nd edition, 2000 with Mary Ellen Bates),  Secrets of the Super Net Searchers (Information Today/CyberAge Books, 1996),  Secrets of the Super Searchers (Information Today/CyberAge Books, 1993), and Electronic Information Delivery:  Evaluating Quality and Value (Gower, 1995). She is executive editor of the Super Searchers book series, currently consisting of about a dozen titles, published by Information Today, Inc.

 

For more than two years, she wrote the "Reva's (W)rap" column that appeared on the inside back page of Online magazine. She was the Cybernaut columnist for Computer Life, a Ziff-Davis magazine, and she wrote the Compleat Searcher column for Online User for that publication’s entire run. Her feature articles have appeared in a variety of other publications including EContent, Searcher, Information Today, LinkUp, PC Today, Smart Computing, eBay Magazine, Whole Earth Review, New Age Journal, Fringeware Review, Artpaper, San Francisco Focus, and the San Francisco Chronicle. She has edited and contributed chapters, introductions and interviews to several books about the Internet and online information retrieval, including Carla Sinclair's Net Chick, Pamela Kane's Hitchhiker's Guide to the Electronic Highway, Sue Rugge and Alfred Glossbrenner's Information Broker's Handbook and Mary Ellen Bates' Online Deskbook. She was the subject of a profile in the May 1995 issue of WIRED magazine, which called her “the ultimate intelligent agent.”

    

Reva is a Past President (1991-1992) of the Association of Independent Information Professionals, and was a longtime member of the Special Libraries Association. She taught a course called "Information Brokering: Is this career for you?" at the University of California Berkeley Extension,  and will teach a distance learning course in Advanced Online Searching  at San Jose State University/School of Library and Information Studies, in the spring of 2003.

    

Reva has a degree in English Literature, summa cum laude, from the University of Pennsylvania, and a Masters degree in Library Science from the University of California, Berkeley. She began her career as a corporate librarian, ran her own independent research business for ten years, and has been online since the mid‑1970s.     

    

She is an active participant in The WELL, one of the early cyberspace communities, and has hosted  several conferences there, including Women on the WELL and InkWELL, an interactive interview conference spotlighting books and authors.

 

She lives on the northern California coast with her husband, several cats, and satellite access to the Internet.