eReviews: General Reference Sources and Short Takes
Oct 15, 2010While we take considerable joy in examining the flashy new features, dazzling technical capabilities, and growing sophistication of resources in this column, here our focus is pretty old-school: content quality. People searching for reference information don’t need to be dazzled—they want information that is accurate and authoritative, and above all else, they want it to be simple to access. (If Wikipedia had theme music, that would the cue.)
All of the resources here—Credo General Reference Premium, Gale Virtual Reference Library, Oxford Digital Reference Shelf, and Sage Reference Online—have established themselves as reliable providers of reference material, and their transition from print to electronic publication is fairly conservative. Most of the emphasis in interface design goes toward increased ease of use. While Credo upholds both the content quality and ease-of-use standard common to all, it represents a departure as well. Its extensive customizability, Concept Maps, Topic Pages, and links from article bibliographies to the library’s OPAC force us to ask at least whether we should begin to expect more from a reference ebook collection than a faithful reproduction of a printed text.
Credo General Reference Premium (CGR)
(formerly Credo Unlimited)
Credo Reference
credoreference.com
CONTENT Now with 500-plus titles from more than 70 publishers, Credo General Reference (CGR) is making a name for itself as a thoroughly customizable online reference experience, organizing content within 17 subject categories such as Art, Business, Food & Beverage, Geography, History, Language, Law, Medicine, Music, Religion, Social Sciences, and Technology. Titles come from a broad spectrum of publishers: ABC-CLIO, Blackwell, CABI, Elsevier, H.W. Wilson, MIT Press, and Springer.
For premium subscribers, new content is added automatically to the collection, and for those institutions subscribing to services such as Credo 100, titles can be added or deleted through a collection- management system.
Recent improvements include bookmark and share tools such as Twitter, Facebook, and Delicious, as well as “Gadgets,” offering a crossword solver, quotations search, conversions tool, and more. Entries can be saved, printed, emailed, exported to RefWorks, EndNote, etc., and MARC records are available for all titles.
Search results are grouped into two areas: Topic Pages and Reference Entries that include all other Credo content. Credo’s Topic Pages are making waves in the blogosphere as a novel approach to presenting and organizing information resources, incorporating topical material from within Credo along with e-resources to which an institution has access. (For more on Credo Topic Pages, see Cheryl Laguardia’s Ereviews, LJ 10/1, p. 98).
Out of the box, without any customization, each Topic Page features a lead article, with links to additional entries in Credo and a related topic word cloud, which assists users in finding other relevant Topic Pages. Add access to as many e-resources that Credo has agreements with (including CQ Press, ebrary, EBSCO, WilsonWeb, etc.), and this may just be the ticket for seamlessly integrating resources and providing users with a means to go beyond basic search.
Offered either as a subscription or perpetual purchase option is Credo Publisher Collections (formerly Specialist Reference), a new service with more than 170 titles. Institutions can supplement the Credo Reference database with subject-specific reference titles from Berkshire Publishing, CABI, IGI Global, MIT Press, Longman, SAGE Reference, and Wiley-Blackwell.
USABILITY Even without the Topic Pages, the Credo Reference interface is fully customizable, allowing an institution to display standard navigation to important local resources at the top of the screen. Keeping our students “close to home,” our custom menu links to the Catalog, Databases site, Federated search, and Ask-a-Librarian. In addition, the main navigation includes Search, Find a Book, Advanced Search, Concept Map, Saved Results, Gadgets, and Help.
At first, Credo Reference appears to have a moderately simplistic search interface, but in actuality, users can take advantage of the wide range of search functionality to retrieve material that best suits their research needs. Searching can be basic or advanced, with limiting/narrowing by subject, date, article type, etc. We started with Find a Book, which allows for browse by Subject, Title, Dewey or LC Classification, or Type of book—including 18 categories, e.g., Atlas, Facts, Gazetteer, Image Collections, Speeches, Statistics, and Unknown (yes, that is an actual type!). Choosing LC Classification affords more detail than a typical subject browse. Selecting Political Science (J), we quickly scanned the hierarchy of General (JA), Political Theory (JC), International Relations (JZ), and more.
Browsing a specific book— Encyclopedia of Intelligence & Counterintelligence —presents five tabs: About, Headings, People, Images, and Contributors, where users can read an overview of the contents and get a preview of individual entries. From the Images tab, we selected a picture of Ethel Rosenberg, which displays the full entry “Rosenberg, Julius and Ethel.” There is plenty of information packed on the screen—cross-references and See Also references to content within the same book and References with established links to our library holding through a link resolver setup. This allows for seamless connectivity to additional resources from our online catalog or via Document Delivery.If that wasn’t enough for a basic browse, users can implement “Related entries,” “Related resources,” and “Adjacent entries” from the left side of the display.
Related entries are Credo Reference’s special cross-references that link to related information contained in any book across the whole digital reference collection. Related resources allow users to continue researching their topic using e-resources added by their institution. We have customized this feature to map entries to specific subject databases, so our users can begin the review of additional scholarly material in the relevant databases we think best. Selecting any resource will execute a search with the Credo entry heading used as a search term.
Users can also employ a search across all Credo content, not just within a particular subject area or specific title. In the case of “Rosenberg, Julius and Ethel” in All Subjects, we retrieved 122 entries and could quickly narrow this query, again using the left-side panel.
We couldn’t conclude this review without mentioning Concept Map, a visual interactive map that displays how search terms and topics in Credo Reference are interconnected. Our students love this approach—especially when exploring unfamiliar material.
PRICING CGR and Credo Publisher Collections are priced based on FTE. The expanding Credo Publisher Collections offer both subscription and perpetual purchase pricing options. Trials available.
END USERS CGR offers first-rate search options for all levels of users. Introduce it to first-years beginning their college research or direct more experienced searchers to it; all will benefit. The customization options are limitless, and institutions can incorporate and promote their e-resources for a valuable and successful “start here” opportunity.
Gale Virtual Reference Library (GVRL)
Gale Cengage Learning
gale.cengage.com
CONTENT As one of the world’s premiere publishers of print and ebook reference titles, Cengage Learning’s Gale Virtual Reference Library (GVRL) has the potential to be as vast and content-rich as your library’s budget will allow. The Gale Cengage site lists thousands of titles in subject areas such as Arts & Humanities, Biography & Genealogy, Business, Career & Education, Children’s/Young Adult Literature, History, Humanities/Philosophy, Information Industry, International Business, Law & Government, Literature, Medicine/Health, Multicultural Studies, Nation & World, Reference-General, Religion & Phenomena, Science, Social Studies, Spanish-Language Resources, Sports, Technology, and Women’s Studies.
The website also lists several special collections that can be incorporated into GVRL, including titles made available via partnerships with DK, Greenhaven Press, and Greenwood Publishing Group. Many subject-specific collections in such areas as Black History, Politics and Government, and Professional Development give collection builders the option of adding even more depth to their ebook holdings.
Although Gale introduces new editions of reference classics at reasonable intervals, the contents of each ebook are not updated between these major revisions.
USABILITY GVRL offers users three search-mode options when they access the resource online—Basic Search, Subject Guide Search, and Advanced Search. In Basic, users see all your library’s titles organized by subject area (although they may hide the individual titles so that just the subjects appear). Basic offers a single search box supplemented by a row of radio buttons allowing the searcher to specify that search terms appear in the document title, as Keywords, within the Entire Document, or as a Subject.
As one would expect, searching for a term in a document title yields particularly precise results. We searched for stewardship and got a single hit, from the 2009 Encyclopedia of Environmental Ethics and Philosophy. The same search yielded 27 books as a Keywords search and 92 when we specified our intent to search the Entire Document—so although the online Help neglects to detail the difference between those two search options, Keywords clearly has a specific meaning here.
See Also references appearing at the end of articles are hyperlinked in the HTML version of the entry, and all the ones we tested worked fine, not surprisingly.
For a student in a “Drugs and Culture” seminar, we ran an Advanced Search on peyote AND (law OR legal) with the Keyword pull-down option selected; this yielded three good hits. Then, we reran it with the Entire Document option selected: 19 hits. Results were somewhat more diffuse for the larger set but notable for the inclusion of several articles on various tribal groups along with articles relating to mysticism, New Age spiritualism, states of consciousness, and the Inquisition in the New World. For both searches, we limited results to titles in the History, Multicultural, or Religion subject areas.
Other pull-downs enable searching by Image Caption, Publication Title, Author, Publisher, and various bibliographic details. Selecting the Previous Searches pull-down causes a link to earlier search strategies to pop up and enables the selection of search sets for incorporation into the current strategy—a sophisticated feature that is too well hidden.
Advanced Search mode also allows users to specify a General or Academic audience and supports limiting the results to documents with images or by publication title and date range.
Subject Guide Search mode probably won’t get a ton of use in most settings, in part because identifying a viable Subject Term can be a hit-and-miss affair. It is, however, a potentially valuable way to generate and explore a list of Subject Terms and Related Subjects. Our search on hate crimes yielded four articles (all from the 2007 Prejudice in the Modern World Reference Library), plus eight additional Related Subjects.
In all search modes, the results list may be narrowed by Document Type, Publication Title, or by Subjects via a pull-down menu.
Navigation can be a little awkward, chiefly because the link back to the results list is a little too subtle, while the more prominent Results for Basic Search (KE (<keyword>)) link is, in fact, the edit search link.
Despite GVRL’s somewhat prosaic look, the resource possesses an impressive tool kit. In addition to standard features like the ability to save, print, email, and download selected articles, there’s an 11-language translation feature; a citation tool (with two editions of MLA plus APA and a plain-text option with bibliographic tags); the ability to export (to EndNote, ProCite, Reference Manager, and RefWorks); a natural-sounding text-to-speech capability that permits users to listen to articles online or download them as audio files to their computers or MP3 players; a Bookmark feature; and ready access to Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary. Each article is assigned a durable URL.
PRICING Pricing is based on library type and population served, and it varies from title to title. Registered users may view pricing and availability information, place and track orders, renew online subscriptions, and create wish lists. Free trials are available.
END USERS Without question, far flashier resources exist, and in terms of technology, GVRL is essentially an assemblage of searchable reference books published online as PDFs. As far as content goes, however, Gale represents the gold standard in reference works. Moreover, libraries have total flexibility to construct a collection that perfectly meets the needs of their constituencies.
Oxford Digital Reference Shelf (DRS)
Oxford University Press
oxford-digitalreference.com
CONTENT The Oxford Digital Reference Shelf (DRS) gives libraries the opportunity to purchase ebook editions from Oxford’s growing catalog of highly respected reference titles. Individual titles acquired via Oxford DRS may be accessed as stand-alone resources, each with its own URL, or searched in concert with the Oxford Reference Online: Premium Collection, a subscription-based service incorporating over 1.4 million entries from some 215 titles. The potent Oxford DRS/Oxford Reference Online combination gives your library a particularly effective way to complement the scholarly, encyclopedia-type resources characteristic of the former with the extensive list of (mostly) short-entry resources contained in the latter.
The two dozen or so History and Culture titles include encyclopedias of various places (Africa, ancient Greece and Rome, Byzantium, Egypt, and Mesopotamia), ethnic groups (African American women, Mesoamerican cultures, and Latinos in the United States), and historical periods (the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and the modern world). Additionally there are a number of titles dealing with such areas as African American history, the Dead Sea Scrolls, African thought, the book, the Christian church, the Reformation, food, and economic history. The six Literature and Language titles cover encyclopedias of rhetoric, semiotics, linguistics, and American, British, and children’s literature.
Arts coverage is quite extensive, with the bulk of it delivered by Grove (including encyclopedias of classical art and architecture, the decorative arts, Islamic art and architecture, art materials and techniques, and Northern Renaissance art), along with works on aesthetics, architecture, popular music, dance, and theater.
The considerably thinner science coverage, however, comes via encyclopedias on evolution and global change. The three Social Sciences titles deal with human rights, peace, and social work, and there are also titles covering international legal history and international law.
Finally, nine titles from Continuum—an independent publisher of scholarly reference titles partnering with Oxford in this venture—explore such subjects as Islamic philosophy, religion and nature, American philosophers and economists, American management, and 20th-century theater. Titles on medieval warfare and military technology, British philosophy, and sexuality have recently been added.
USABILITY While the Oxford DRS interface couldn’t be much more straightforward, considerable sophistication resides unobtrusively below the system’s surface. We searched the 2008 Encyclopedia of Social Work, a joint publication of the National Association of Social Workers and Oxford University Press.
The homepage for this title includes a description of its contents, basic bibliographic information, and a single search box followed by Go and Help buttons. Multiple search terms are implicitly ANDed together, and our search on girls juvenile justice produced a results list with two items, headed by a note reading: “Search level: All search terms in entry headings [info].” The [info] link leads to the Help page, where it is explained that the search engine stopped at Level 1 because all the search terms entered appeared prominently in an entry heading or other key element of the entry. Satisfied searchers may then examine the resulting and (in this case) highly relevant encyclopedia articles, or opt to print or email the results list. An additional option is to Widen Your Search. Clicking on this button produces a results list that has expanded to 13 hits, i.e., a somewhat less precise Level 2 search in which all three of the search terms appear in the full text of each article.
Clicking the Widen Your Search button again drives the results list for the search terms girls justice juvenile up to 282 titles. We’re now at a Level 3 search, where only one search term need be present in the full text of an entry. Relevancy ranking keeps the list from becoming useless.
A Level 4 Pattern search compensates for misspellings by attempting to find terms spelled like the ones a searcher has entered. Searches that are unsuccessful at one level automatically move down a level in precision until results are finally achieved.
Oxford DRS also provides a Browse mode, which permits searchers to page through an alphabetical list of entries or key in a term to jump through the listing more rapidly. Titles and cross-references are both listed, which increases accessibility and ease of use.
Oxford DRS supports several forms of wild cards, truncation, and phrase searching via the use of quotation marks; as noted, this is seamlessly cross-searchable with Oxford Reference Online: Premium Collection.
MARC records are available, and Oxford DRS titles may be added to you library’s federated search service. The online Help is context-sensitive and excellent. PRICING Oxford DRS titles are available as a onetime purchase, which includes remote access and access for an unlimited number of simultaneous users. There are discounts for multiple ebook purchases as well as cases where a library buys both the print and the online editions of a title.
List prices on individual titles range from about $181 for the 1998 Encyclopedia of Semiotics to $1,875 for the 2006 Continuum Encyclopedia of British Philosophy, but a fall special running through November 12, 2010, offers discounts ranging from 15 percent for the 2010 titles to 50 percent for titles published in 2008 or earlier. Discounts on bundled packages were even steeper; a bundle of more than 20 pre-2006 titles is selling for $3500 during this offer, a discount of well over $8000 from list price.
Libraries own the titles they purchase. Oxford charges a small annual maintenance fee, but hosting is free for Oxford Reference Online: Premium Collection subscribers. Libraries may request a free 30-day trial.
END USERS Generally speaking, for resources in the general reference category, content quality far outweighs any other evaluation criteria, and DRS excels by that standard. Although there are only about 60 or so titles available currently, the count is growing steadily, and many will perfectly match the needs of academic researchers and specialists. The resource couldn’t be simpler to use, and particularly when coupled with Oxford Reference Online: Premium Collection it becomes a go-to research tool for students and scholars alike.
SAGE Reference Online (SRO)
SAGE Publications
sagepub.com
CONTENT With numerous awards under its belt, SAGE Reference Online (SRO) is a respected e-collection of more than 220 multidisciplinary handbooks and encyclopedias across the social sciences. Titles can be searched or browsed within 24 subject categories, including African American Studies, Counseling & Psychotherapy, Economics, Environment, Family Studies, History, Politics & International Relations, Research Methods & Evaluation, and Urban Studies & Planning. This is considered by many to be one of the first ebook collections created exclusively from a publisher’s existing print holdings. SAGE Publishing has digitized almost its entire backlist content, which is available as a collection of 82 titles published from 2002–08 as SRO Backlist Encyclopedia Collection.
The current SRO 2010 Encyclopedia Collection contains 24 titles, including Encyclopedia of Nanoscience and Society, Green Energy: An A-Z Guide, Encyclopedia of Research Design, and Encyclopedia of Social Movement Media.
Institutions can also purchase the SRO Backlist Handbook Collection, made up of 80 titles from 2000–07. A sampling of current Handbook titles includes Handbook of Lesbian and Gay Studies, Sage Handbook of Comparative Politics, and Handbook of Contemporary Families.
Individual titles can be purchased separately, although discounts are given for multivolume purchase. In addition to the standard collections available, SAGE offers a Community College & Law Library Bundle (11 titles), an SRO Public Library Bundle (ten titles), and an A-Z series just released in May, the Green Society Bundle, with Green Business, Green Cities, Green Consumerism, Green Energy, Green Food, and Green Politics.
The SAGE platform supports unlimited use and perpetual access; entries can also be emailed, printed, and exported with Citation Manager. COUNTER-compliant usage statistics are available, and free MARC Records are provided through OCLC. Forthcoming enhancements will include customized cobranding (including upload of logos) and MARC records available from either OCLC or publishers directly.
USABILITY Home, Advanced, Browse is the standard three-tab top-level menu choice on every page, and the browser navigation functions quite well.
Quick Search is present throughout the site, so while users might be deep into the contents of a book, a new search can always be executed. Advanced Search supports the standard Boolean operators, field searching, wild cards, and stemming. Users can limit results by selecting specific titles, subjects, or entries that have sidebars, images, or tables.
Users can browse all available titles or by type (Encyclopedia or Handbook) or Subject category. Once a title is selected, the browse feature allows you to view the contents using Reader’s Guide, Entries A-Z, or the book’s Subject Index. The Reader’s Guide tool works nicely and displays the entries topically for a quick view of the subject matter.
Sticking with the browse mode, we selected “Education” as a Subject category. In addition to the center display of all titles that fall within this category, a left panel highlights the preferred subject and allows users to change their selection without having to start over from another menu. After selecting a title—in our case, The Encyclopedia of Curriculum Studies—users see an “About This Reference” feature on the left panel. It includes PDF files such as Introduction, Editorial Board, Appendix, and Tables. On the right panel is the book cover with part of the introduction and a “Read More” link. Starting with Reader’s Guide, we retrieved ten major topics and chose Nature of Curriculum Studies, which listed 36 entries. Selecting one of those, Curriculum Leadership, puts the entry at center screen, while the left panel now displays a link back to Reader’s Guide (with the related topics), See Also links, and a list of Related Titles in the institution’s collection.
Our first Quick Search for “charter schools” retrieved 183 titles (ordered by relevance). The left panel allows users to Refine Search either through the Advanced mode, by Search Within Results, or Start A New Search. We could also refine our query to search entries with just images, sidebars, etc. Deciding to narrow our search to “privatization” dropped our list to 36. A sampling of those articles included “Privatization?? from Encyclopedia of Educational Leadership and Administration, “Charter Education” from Encyclopedia of Educational Reform and Dissent, and “Globalization and Education” in Encyclopedia of the Social and Cultural Foundations of Education.
Keywords are readily apparent throughout articles. Each article is signed, and citation format options are located at the bottom of the screen. In addition to the further reading suggestions, some entries include links to external articles and websites. Choosing to email an entry allows users to access a link back to the article for up to two weeks.
PRICING Worth mentioning—since it isn’t necessarily common practice—is that all pricing for current and backlist collections plus individual titles, along with information on date of publication for print and e-format, is available online. Hosting fees are included in purchase price for five years. For information on consortia pricing or hosting fee schedule, contact SAGE. Trials available.
END USERS SRO is in principle an e-platform for SAGE Publishing print content. In that respect, it’s an excellent medium to deliver the purchased goods. Including a search history might be nice, as well as being able to link out from Further Readings, but that’s not much to fuss about.
While SAGE e-titles are now available through a variety of e-content vendors (Gale as individual titles and Credo with specific collections), it is nice to recognize that the SRO interface will stand up to the other players. With SRO, an institution can focus on cost effectiveness for delivery of content rather than technical functionality.
E-SHORT TAKES
ABC-CLIO eBook Collection
ABC-CLIO, ebooks.abc-clio.com
With unlimited, simultaneous access, ABC-CLIO eBook Collection has recently been enhanced with new and updated features and search functionality. Offering cross-searchable access to 6000-plus encyclopedias, dictionaries, handbooks, and guides from ABC-CLIO, Greenwood Press, Libraries Unlimited, and Praeger, this resource enables users to browse by title, subject, author, or publication year and do Quick (keyword, author or title) or Advanced (with date/subject/image limiting) search. Use "My Bookshelf" or the "My Bookmarks and Notes" tab to create a user profile and save searches, notes, and bookmarked entries. There's persistent URL linking for web pages and course work, and definition look-up with The American Heritage College Dictionary. Chapters or entry sections can be printed or emailed, with easy export to RefWorks. Trails available.
Britannica Online
Encyclopædia Britannica
britannica.com
The famous Encyclopædia Britannica presents a variety of online options for all types of users, including the de facto Britannica Online, designed for the academic environment with Encyclopædia Britannica plus magazines and periodicals, and many other research tools like optional Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary and Thesaurus integration; Britannica Online School Edition for the K-12 set; Universalis Junior, with 2500 encyclopedia articles; Britannica Online Public Library Edition for public library settings; Global Reference Center, a collection of Encyclopædia Britannica's foreign-language content; and 21st Century Explorer for "reluctant readers, ELL and ESL students, and adult literacy students." There's also the free Britannica.com-a search and directory site featuring Encyclopædia Britannica, websites, news, and magazines. Trials available for all products.
Grolier Online
Scholastic Inc.
teacher.scholastic.com/products/grolier
Grolier Online offers access to several authoritative resources including Encyclopedia Americana, which features comprehensive coverage of all academic fields and curriculum topics, ranging from arts and geography to science and technology. With thousands of illustrations, maps, links to bibliographies, websites, external articles, and international news sources for further research, the interface also includes tabs for Atlas and Dictionaries. Grolier Multimedia Encyclopedia supplies the visual approach via photographs, videos, and interactive maps. Also included: "Research Starters" for help with History, Literature and Arts, Science, and Social Studies topics; The New Book of Knowledge, a general reference tool for the younger set, with teacher resources, news, projects and experiments; and La Nueva Enciclopedia Cumbre, a Spanish-language encyclopedia written from the Latin American perspective, with interactive Spanish-language maps, time lines of important historical events, an events calendar detailing cultural holidays and festivals, support for basic Spanish instruction, and more. Trials available.
Reference Universe
Paratext Electronic Reference Publishing
refuniv.odyssi.com
A somewhat different reference resource than the others listed and quite a valuable database for librarians and patrons alike. Reference Universe, defined as the "cumulative index" to a library's reference collection, is a web-based research tool that allows users to search across more than 40,000 specialized subject encyclopedias, creating a customized view of your institution's holdings along with active links to subscribed e-collections. This tool can also be used for collection development purposes, allowing librarians to track easily what titles might be relevant to add based on search queries, as well as what specific titles might be worthy of discard. A "Reference Widget" can be included in web pages or subject guides for quick access to index-level searching of ebook reference and print collections. Users can choose to limit just to ebook or print holdings only, although the default tracks resources in all formats. One can easily add or delete content through a new administrative module.
Trails available.
World Book
World Book, Inc.
worldbook.com
No shelf room for the 25-volume print encyclopedia set? World Book also offers an array of online products to complement all library settings. In addition to the annual World Book Encyclopedia on DVD, affordable options include World Book Web (one-month or one-year subscription), which contains World Book Advanced, designed for high school and college students, with a fully integrated database of multimedia, ebook, and primary-source material; World Book Student, with the articles of the World Book Encyclopedia, a Biography Center, Dictionary, Atlas, multimedia collection, editor-selected websites, and correlations to curriculum standards; World Book Discover, with reference articles, text-to-speech capabilities, learning and life skills activities, research tools, multimedia, and interactive video; World Book Kids, based on World Book's Discovery Encyclopedia, including early-learner articles, images and illustrations, interactive games and activities, and teacher resources; and World Book Enciclopedia Estudiantil Hallazgos, with editorial content, media, and interactive features in Spanish.
