E-Views and Reviews: A Print “Tradition” on Ebook

By Cheryl LaGuardia -- Library Journal, 5/1/2007

The Encyclopedia-Off, Round 6 I recently came across something interesting when comparing the entries on Gamal Abdel Nasser in Encyclopaedia Britannica and Wikipedia. I found this sentence in Britannica: “Nasser was born in a mud-brick house on an unpaved street in the Bacos section of Alexandria, where his father was in charge of the local post office. In an effort to cultivate a more earthy image of the president as a member of the class of rural agrarians (fellahin), Egyptian government publications for years gave his birthplace as Bani Murr, the primitive Upper Egypt village of his ancestors.” Then I found a sentence in the Wikipedia entry that was almost identical to the Britannica one. Hmmm. I'm now paying more attention to the disclaimer at the beginning of Wikipedia articles: “This article or section does not adequately cite its references or sources.” This round goes to Britannica. The score thus far: Britannica 2, Wikipedia 4.

Quote of the Week “Emerald is accustomed to using technology to push content out to the user, which helps libraries with marketing. We stay attuned to user needs via help-desk feedback, advisors, workshops, and our regional managers. Our online products are developed as a direct result of this feedback. We want to make them more useful to managers and researchers and are looking at the transformation of Emerald content into podcast audio files and offering articles for sale in formats suitable for downloading onto handheld devices.”—Amanda Briggs, Head, Research & Development, Emerald Group

Encyclopaedia Judaica, 2d ed., an eBook version
Thomson Gale
www.encyclopaediajudaica.com

This is the online version of the 22-volume printed second edition of Encyclopaedia Judaica, published recently by Macmillan Reference USA (an imprint of Thomson Gale) and Keter Publishing House. This updated edition of the 1972 classic contains over 21,000 scholarly articles (with 2600 new entries), 600 maps, tables, and illustrations, 150 pages of color photos, 30,000 new bibliographical listings, and, according to the Gale web site, “extensive new treatments of contemporary Jewish life, including added emphasis of the role of women and explorations of the full global scope of the Diaspora.”

How Does It Work? The opening page shows a thumbnail photo of the cover of the print Encyclopaedia, along with publication data (ISBN, subjects, brief description). It also offers a Quick Search, with a Find search box, as well as options for Basic Search and Advanced Search. Basic Search lets you search (using a single box) within Document title, Keyword, or Entire document. Advanced Search gives you three rows of search boxes and lets you limit your results: to documents with images, by publication date or a range of dates, by publication title, to a subject area, or to a target audience. This search system is designed for the most part for other e-resources affording more options than this one does. Since there is only one option available here in most categories (the publication title is Encyclopaedia Judaica, the default subject is Religion, and the default target audience is Academic), it doesn't make sense for users to be given the “option” of choosing from a single default. But that is a pitfall with software that's been designed to serve disparate kinds of e-resources.

Can You and Your Patrons Use It? My first Quick search for “netanyahu” located the entry “Netanyahu, Binyamin,” with links to full text, two PDF pages, a link to the “about” page for the Encyclopaedia, and a link for ways to cite the article (or to export it into EndNote, ProCite, Reference Manager, or RefWorks), as well as a generic citation for the signed article. Quite impressive, except that during the first ten minutes or so of working within the entry, I completely missed the full text.

When I clicked that link, I was taken to a new screen with the citation for the entry without the full-text option. The text was separated from the citation and just far enough down the page that I couldn't see it. So I had one of those “reviewer disjunctured” experiences of scratching my head, wondering if it was the resource or me, until I eventually located the full text. At that point, I was able to scan the text quickly, with the search term highlighted in red and with active hyperlinks.

Next I tried a Basic search for the words “gush katif” in the document title. It located a one-and-a-half-page article about the history of this group of 18 Jewish settlements in the Gaza Strip. The graphics within articles (such as the maps) display more clearly in the PDF version, which makes for better printing as well. Each article is scholarly, signed, and remarkably up-to-date for a print-based resource.

How Good Is It? Despite some difficulty in getting to the full text, this is a work of tremendous scholarship and importance. As such, it deserves a 10.

What's the Cost? The ebook version of Encyclopaedia Judaica goes for approximately $2100/year; the 22-volume library print edition is $1,995.

The Bottom Line Students and scholars of Jewish studies and the librarians serving them have been waiting for years for this resource to be digitized. Strongly recommended for all libraries.