E-Views and Reviews: Routledge Content Goes Online

By Cheryl LaGuardia -- Library Journal, 9/1/2005

Meta-searching, cross-searching, soul-searching
It's time to get this unnamable issue onto the table. I want to hear from you and your users about what you are making of meta-searching. I for one continue to be torn between the potential and the reality.

Free lunch? Really?
Alexander Street Press recently unveiled a new web resource, In the First Person: Index to Letters, Diaries, Oral Histories, and Other Personal Narratives. It is a library index that allows users to perform field and keyword searches across letters, diaries, oral histories, memoirs, and autobiographies available for free online and through Alexander Street databases [see InfoTech, p. 28]. Check it out at www.inthefirstperson.com.

Quote of the Week "We believe In the First Person will attract researchers and let them see the value of all of our databases and experience our unique Semantic Indexing™.… Giving something back to the community will generate much more awareness and goodwill for Alexander Street than the expensive advertising and flood of mailings that many companies often spend money on.… The only thing that will make us stop producing In the First Person is if people don't use it."—Eileen Lawrence, Vice President for Sales and Marketing, Alexander Street Press

This is one of the first of a series of online resources Routledge is developing. It contains nearly 15,000 pages worth of content from 27 printed reference works, mostly bearing the Routledge imprint but also Garland, Fitzroy Dearborn, and Routledge Curzon. Titles include A Dictionary of Egyptian Gods and Goddesses; Dictionary of Ethics; Theology and Society; Encyclopedia of African American Religions; Encyclopedia of Monasticism, The Encyclopedia of Protestantism; Encyclopedia of Religion and War; Fifty Eastern Thinkers; The History of Science and Religion in the Western Tradition: An Encyclopedia; The North American Muslim Resource Guide: Muslim Community Life in the United States and Canada; A Popular Dictionary of Paganism; Reader's Guide to Judaism; Who's Who in the Old Testament; The World's Religions; and The Routledge Dictionary of Gods and Goddesses, Devils and Demons.All articles are signed and of high quality (they are from Routledge). They also address many areas beyond religion, such as philosophy, regional and cultural studies, history, and other humanities and social science disciplines. New material will be added at least annually.

How Does It Work? Plain, vanilla, one-box quick searches are doable at any point with a persistent search box displayed conveniently at screen top right. Advanced Search, available via a persistent toolbar, lets you search Headings, Full Text, Names of people in headings, Names of people in bibliographies, or Names of works in bibliographies. You can search all the books in the file or any combination.

Can You and Your Patrons Use It? A quick search for "mamlukes" in all the books displayed 15 results from six books. When I searched for "mameluks," an alternate spelling, I got five results from four different books, and all five were different from the 15 I got in my first search. Given that this is a Routledge product, I was surprised at the disparity and lack of authority control since both spellings are okay. In help I found the two truncation symbols (? for single characters and * for multiple). A search for mam*luk* produced all 20 results.

My Advanced Search for Alan Watts yielded seven substantial articles about him, but this search brought out several problems with the design. First, the screens are put together so that there is a lot of scrolling. In Advanced Search, there is only one Search button, at the bottom of the screen. Once I realized I was, by default, searching all the books, I wanted just to put my terms in and search. But I had to scroll down the screen and click the Search button after entering my terms. When I did scroll down the screen through my search results, I discovered it was possible to refine my search by prompt lists on screen left, by book and by subject, but frankly it didn't make much sense to limit my result of seven to the one hit that came out of the Encyclopedia of Religion and War. I'd rather see greater flexibility and power in the Advanced searching up front than this unnecessary add-on.

How Good Is It? The content is excellent. The design, on the other hand, is not state-of-the-art. Routledge gets extra points for the superb "How to cite this article Modern Language Association style" feature—the best I've seen to date. I don't like the search interface, but, still, you can search all 27 books at once in contrast to the Oxford Digital Reference Shelf (LJ 5/1/05), where you have to search each of its 12 titles separately. Overall, it is a solid nine (out of ten).

What's the Cost? Given the scope of the file, the price of $1750 for four concurrent users is reasonable.

The Bottom Line: Strongly recommended for academic libraries serving graduate-level students in the humanities, as well as for medium to large public libraries and special libraries serving religion, history, philosophy, and cultural studies scholars.