E-Views and Reviews: Rare Books Preserved Online

FINDING THE RIGHT COLLEGE is uppermost in the minds of many parents and high school students right about now. To help answer their questions, you should be aware of a new product called My College Advisor (www.mycollegeadvisor.com). Consisting of CDs, manuals, and a web site, it is a selection system geared to finding, getting into, and paying for college. Endorsed by the National Association for College Admission Counseling, the product screens colleges according to freshman retention and graduation rates while comparing actual out-of-pocket costs for various schools. At $139.95, it is affordable for both libraries and families.

QUOTE OF THE WEEK “One of the trends we’re seeing in libraries is a desire for electronic reference resources that do more than aggregate lots of information in one place. Frankly, 10,000 hits is still 9990 too many, even for people with good information literacy skills. Increasingly, librarians are telling us they want resources that are carefully crafted with only relevant information and that are put together with all the expertise we can muster. We believe that reference publishing has to be about providing expert historical analysis and perspective, that informed opinion, properly identified as such and put into context to understand the writer’s viewpoint and background, becomes valuable reference material that can help us better understand our world. ABC-CLIO’s newest database, Issues: Understanding Controversy and Society, is based on these principles.”—Becky Snyder, President, ABC-CLIO

Rarebooks.info.
www.rarebooks.info

Rarebooks.info is an extraordinary database of 80 online library catalogs and descriptive bibliographies for hard-to-find books. The file contains more than 600,000 pages of scanned full-text, fully searchable facsimiles from the original sources, covering a broad range of subjects, including art and architecture, cultural and regional studies, the history of the book, Judaica, medicine, music, natural history, science, theology, travel, world literatures, and more.

The web site provides the full List of Available Titles, but here are just a few to convey the flavor: José Almirante’s 1876 Bibliografia Militar de Espana; The Catalogue of the Avery Architectural Library, from the Library of Columbia College, 1895, 1st ed.; Catalogues of the Fairfax Murray Collections of French, German, and Italian Fifteenth and Sixteenth Century Books; G.A. Pritzel’s Thesaurus literaturae botanicae omnium gentium; and the ten volumes of Avenir Tchermezine’s Bibliographie d’éditions originales et rares d’auteurs français des XVe, XVIe, XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles.

HOW DOES IT WORK? The main search screen offers five options: Basic Search, Advanced Search, Browse Works, Browse Topics, and Search History. In Basic Search, search the entire database or a single reference work for single words or phrases using wildcards, Boolean operators, proximity operators, and by “fuzzy” search degrees (to find other words close in spelling to the original word). Advanced Search lets you do full-text searches of multiple works or multiple topics. The screen is clean and uncluttered, and it’s very easy to move around the file.

CAN YOU AND YOUR PATRONS USE IT? My first foray into the file was a Basic Search for political economist Adam Smith, using an exact phrase search type. I got 130 hits in 49 different files. The first set of hits appeared in S. Austin Allibone’s Critical Dictionary of English Literature and British and American Authors Living and Deceased from the Earliest Accounts to the Latter Half of the Nineteenth Century. A View link took me into the entry on Smith, with my search phrase highlighted in yellow. I next tried an exact phrase search for: smith, adam, and got an “Error 3015,” questioning the correctness of my syntax. My next exact phrase search was for: smith adam, which found 22 hits in 11 files, locating entries expressed as Smith (Adam). I tried several searches using the “within” and “near” proximity operators and got zero or inexplicable results.

HOW GOOD IS IT? The content is truly extraordinary, and the images are excellent. The search system does leave quite a bit to be desired. It’s easy enough to use for simple searches, but it will be challenging to build the more sophisticated searches that scholars who are likely to use this will want. The file gets a ten for content alone, but its relatively weak search system makes it an 8.5.

WHAT’S THE COST? Annual subscriptions range from $540 to $1450 for public libraries, colleges, and universities, with Basic (access limited to one simultaneous user), Standard (access limited to three simultaneous users), and Campus Wide (unlimited access) licensing available. Remote access is not included in the Basic license, but it is included in the Standard and Campus Wide subscriptions.

THE BOTTOM LINE Rarebooks.info will be useful in libraries not owning the original works, based on the content. Many research libraries will own the originals, but affording remote access to this rich body of material will better serve their clientele, so it is also recommended for comprehensive electronic collections.