  The Herschel Reference Survey is a guaranteed time Herschel key project and
will be a benchmark study of dust in the nearby universe. The survey will
complement a number of other Herschel key projects including large cosmological
surveys that trace dust in the distant universe. We will use Herschel to
produce images of a statistically-complete sample of 323 galaxies at 250, 350
and 500 micron. The sample is volume-limited, containing sources with distances
between 15 and 25 Mpc and flux limits in the K-band to minimize the selection
effects associated with dust and with young high-mass stars and to introduce a
selection in stellar mass. The sample spans the whole range of morphological
types (ellipticals to late-type spirals) and environments (from the field to
the centre of the Virgo Cluster) and as such will be useful for other purposes
than our own. We plan to use the survey to investigate (i) the dust content of
galaxies as a function of Hubble type, stellar mass and environment, (ii) the
connection between the dust content and composition and the other phases of the
interstellar medium and (iii) the origin and evolution of dust in galaxies. In
this paper, we describe the goals of the survey, the details of the sample and
some of the auxiliary observing programs that we have started to collect
complementary data. We also use the available multi-frequency data to carry out
an analysis of the statistical properties of the sample.
