A Guide to Travel Guides Exchange rates, airfares, gasoline prices - everything involved in the cost of travel keeps going up.

It gets harder to find time off, and now we're also becoming aware of the environmental cost of travel. All of this makes planning your trip well more important than ever. The Internet has become an indispensable in travel planning, but travel guides still have a lot to offer, especially if you don't want to go with the herd. Your public library is a great resource for travel books, since you won't usually want to keep them. You could go straight to the library shelf, where you'll find most of them in the Dewey call numbers ranging from 914 for Europe to 919 for Australia and the Pacific.

Whatever you find on the shelf, there's a lot more available to request from your library system. When you search the library catalog use the term "guidebooks" as the subject keyword along with the name of the place. The first entry you see will often show the earliest year the library got a title, not the latest year it owns. Library branches often keep an older edition, since we don't get a new one for each place each year. Click on the title to see the copies and find the latest edition to reserve, or your librarian can do this for you.

There are also guidebooks for particular activities, like scuba diving or hiking that might be shelved in other sections so you can try your favorite activities as key words in your search. Lonely Planet has a growing World Food series, found not in travel, not in food, but with titles on culture. For art, see if there's a Blue Guide or check to see if they cover your city in their new little Art, Shop, Eat series for both food and art.

Personally, I'm a compulsive planner, partly because it lets me start enjoying the trip before I go. But even if you like to keep your whole itinerary open and adventurous there are some series that you might want to check out. Insight Guides and Eyewitness Guides both give history and cultural background and have lots of colorful pictures that will give you a clearer idea of what you would like to see and do. The glossy paper makes them heavy, so you probably don't want to take them along on the trip. I like to use them early in the planning process to decide what cities I want to visit.

Fodor's and Frommer's are the traditional, mostly print guidebooks for the luxury to mid-budget traveler. They cover popular destinations in the United States and the world. Lonely Planet and Rough Guides have wider world coverage, suggest a broader range of adventurous activities and nightlife, and recommend more accommodations in the lower price ranges. Time Out and Footprint are similar British series.

The Let's Go series is even more budget-conscious, since it's designed for students. It's the only place I've found information about buses.

Of course the local favorite is Rick Steves. Although he only covers Europe and Turkey, he searches out good deals, suggests good itineraries, and gives helpful advice about what to expect and how to make arrangements yourself.

Moon Handbooks has world coverage, low to mid price range, and also publishes books about each state. Mobil Travel Guides also cover all the states by region.

If you already like one of these series you can do a catalog search with the publisher's name and the place. Allow a little time for requests to come in, and try some series you haven't used before for your next trip. You'll find even more than the ones I've mentioned here, and each has its own strength. Reading about your destination before you go will not only enrich your experience, it will make you a more welcome guest.

Ruth Korkowski is adult services librarian at the High Point Branch.