Reference into the Future

With word of newly launched, redesigned, and reformatted e-content fattening so many reference publishers' catalogs, it has grown increasingly difficult to keep up with the growth and direction of e-reference. Yet, trends point to vast improvements all around: enhanced searchability, greater customization/adaptability, more navigable interfaces, more flexible purchase options, the duplication of content in multiple delivery systems, pay-per-view offerings, and the continued forays into multiple formats.

Several publishers, while dutifully digitizing their backlists, are also updating their print titles by either consolidating (e.g., the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, down to two volumes from the 20 of the full second edition) or expanding forthcoming content for optimal usability (e.g., Springer's Encyclopedia of Cancer, up from one volume to four).

As to what the next decade will bring, there's no shortage of predictions. Casper Grathwohl, VP and publisher of Oxford University Press's reference division, believes that in ten years the Oxford catalog will contain products that are “more focused on academically validating the growing world of available information rather than adding to it.”

ABC-CLIO CEO Ron Boehm sees content traveling outside the library walls to be linked to appropriate courses and developing in collaboration with thousands of scholars worldwide. Gale corporate communications manager Vanessa Birch, too, believes that in the next decade Gale will have closed the gap between the open web and the library. “End users will find their library through a search engine as easily as they find other information,” she says, “so that the library will be fully integrated into the online search experience.”

H.W. Wilson president and CEO Harold Regan, meanwhile, foresees WilsonWeb offering more ways for the user to extract and view or listen to specific components of items indexed, whether video, audio, art reproduction, or links to external sites, “all for a richer search experience not available from free web sites.”

And SAGE VP Rolf Janke envisions SAGE's articles sold on a pay-per-view basis and even a satellite beaming SAGE content all over the world.

Ten years are far off yet, but these publishers' predictions of future reference offerings are, in a way, their mission statements of today. Keeping in mind, then, exactly where these publishers are aiming to go, here's an idea of how far along they are in getting there.

This season, following its June 2007 alliance with EBSCO, ABC-CLIO offers librarians its eight history databases via a new interface, with identical features and functionality throughout. Release 2.0 allows for cross-database searching; filter options for refining searches; and advanced searching by place, time, broad subject, and category. It also sources all entries and MLA citations with translations to other popular styles. Librarians can choose from three different pricing packages offering as few as four and as many as all eight databases.

Within History Reference Online, ABC-CLIO's cross-searchable, full-text collection of reference titles, librarians can select from four different purchase and subscription packages offering anywhere between 270 and 548 titles (at least 50 titles will be added annually to each collection). Not only have the publisher's payment options become more flexible, but there are now more avenues by which to access its 500-plus ebooks: through Ebook Library, MyiLibrary, NetLibrary, or, most recently, ebrary.

Two of the publisher's major print/ebook releases are September's The Encyclopedia of the Cold War: A Political, Social, and Military History and Cold War: A Student Encyclopedia, whose combined ten volumes, 2400 entries, and wealth of images and primary sources draw on recently opened files from archives in China, Eastern Europe, and the former Soviet Union.

“We're passionate about blogs, reader-feedback systems, RSS, and widgets,” says Berkshire founder and CEO Karen Christensen, “and we talk about these and other social-networking tools at conferences around the world [Shanghai this month] as well as on our blog.”

In September, Berkshire launched a promotional service through the Exact Editions platform, which grants users free, fully searchable access to some of the publisher's best-selling backlist reference titles. “It's drawn lots of attention in the open access world,” says Christensen, “and gives librarians the chance to try before they buy.”

The newest titles available through this service are the single-volume Berkshire Encyclopedia of Extreme Sports (May 2007) and the three-volume Global Perspectives on the United States (Vols. 1 & 2, Feb. 2007; Vol. 3, Aug. 2007), which Christensen calls “both a historical overview and a wake-up call about our place in the world.”

In October, Facts On File announced the introduction of videos to its Science Online database. Those searching or browsing the database's nearly 280 videos will not only be able to tune into interviews with eminent figures in the sciences but see firsthand, for example, what nuclear reactions and black holes look like.

The American History Online database, too, now features, among other updates, more than 500 captioned videos covering political, military, social, and cultural history. This flood of video content is largely thanks to the publisher's recent acquisition of Films Media Group, through which Facts On File has gotten an enormous reservoir of video material.

Print-wise, Facts On File's biggest news is the publication this month of the seven-volume Encyclopedia of World History, whose content will be integrated into the publisher's existing databases, e.g., Modern World History Online and Ancient and Medieval History Online, and the restructuring of its Bloom's Literary Criticism imprint to include the “Bloom's How To Write About Literature” and “Bloom's Modern Critical Views” series and the Bloom's Shakespeare Through the Ages set.

According to Gale's Vanessa Birch, librarians have been requesting electronic versions of the publisher's large series titles and directory program as well as a single platform with cross-searchability, a single-user interface, and indexing. Gale's response comes this fall in the form of Literature Criticism Online and Gale Directory Library, designed with a common platform allowing users to cross-search entire holdings or delve into an individual directory title, and PowerSearch Plus, a search platform that provides access to all of a library's database collection and the open web from one starting point.

Gale also has a new digital-archive product, British Library Newspapers, which consists of two fully searchable collections, the 17th- and 18th-century Burney and the 19th-century British Library newspapers. These pool together some 40 million articles.

Notable, too, is the appointment last month of Gale's new president, Patrick C. Sommers, former CEO of the library automation company SirsiDynix.

Greenwood's catalog is continuing its move from traditional A–Z reference books to formats more similar to its “Icons” and “Battlegrounds” series, in which, says Greenwood publicity director Laura Mullen, “selected and well-written essays and book-length works are enriched and enlivened with analysis and apparatus that ties content more closely to the curriculum.” Media literacy, says Mullen, has become a key aspect of Greenwood's publishing program, and online materials, she promises, “will be increasingly customizable”

Rapidly growing are The Greenwood Digital Collection, a research platform offering thousands of fully searchable titles (the newest are listed at ebooks.greenwood.com) and megadatabases like Daily Life Online (DLO). The latter's most recent addition, Daily Life in America, contains 100 recently published titles, thousands of primary documents, and more than 1000 images. It is available as a standalone or fully integrated with the DLO suite.

Next April, Praeger, Greenwood's current events imprint, will launch Culture Universe, a database featuring more than 225 volumes of reviewed and published items. The newest additions to Praeger Security International Online database, meanwhile, which has been updated weekly since its March 2006 launch, include news and RSS feeds, improved cross references, and a new featured-content section.

Back in August, McGraw-Hill Professional redesigned and relaunched its online science and technology encyclopedia, AccessScience, whose core is the McGraw-Hill Encyclopedia of Science & Technology (10th ed., Apr. 2007). The print volumes are complemented by a regularly updated web site, MHEST.com, which features special graphics, tutorials, and more.

The new platform, AccessScience 2.0, offers 8500 online articles and some 15,000 illustrations, with full-text search capability plus such tools as email forwarding, saved-image collections, podcasts, and videos.

The publisher has also made the move, says director of communications Tom Stanton, to align its online medical and engineering resources with international standards for online cataloging. Using MARC 21 standards, McGraw-Hill now enables libraries to expeditiously upload its titles onto their OPACs. This means all books in McGraw-Hill Professional's AccessMedicine and Digital Engineering Library will be visible and searchable through the respective library systems and will link to subscribed content.

“Print reference publishing will have a surprisingly long life,” predicts Oxford's Casper Grathwohl, “but it's not at the center of our momentum anymore.” Instead, OUP is making its frontlist and backlist reference sets available through its Digital Reference Shelf platform, newly expanded with the addition of, among other titles, the four-volume Oxford Encyclopedia of Maritime History and the two-volume Grove Encyclopedia of Decorative Arts.

OUP also recently unveiled the Encyclopedia of Popular Music Online—as an integrated resource with Grove Music Online and Oxford History of Western Music—and Oxford Islamic Studies Online, which features primary source material, two classical interpretations of the Qu'ran that are viewable side by side, images, time lines, and more.

However, the publisher is not phasing out print altogether. Two noteworthy print releases include the sixth edition of Shorter Oxford English Dictionary (see review, LJ 11/15/07), with a CD-ROM and some 2500 new entries and 500 new quotations from authors writing in the last ten years, and next February's eight-volume African American National Biography (see “Behind the Book,” LJ 1/08), which Grathwohl calls “the largest collection of black biographies by almost tenfold.” The e-versions of both works will feature fully searchable interfaces.

A recent shift Grathwohl has noticed in requests from librarians relates to e-content being duplicated in multiple delivery systems. “For years we've been wary of including copyrights in more than one resource,” he says, pointing as an example to having Darlene Clark Hine's Encyclopedia of Black Women in America available both through the African American Studies Center as well as the Digital Reference Shelf. “Not only did we fear we'd cannibalize our own sales, but librarians seemed on the lookout for being taken advantage of—paying for the same content in multiple places.” But things are different these days, he adds. “As long as publishers are up front and offer discounts for subscribers of multiple products, duplicating some content can offer additional access points to that information, which is good for everyone.”

When Anne Savarese joined Princeton as senior editor in 2004, it was to help produce a broader range of reference titles more consistently. Once the list is up and running, Savarese hopes to publish eight to ten titles a year, beginning with the two-volume The Princeton Encyclopedia of the World Economy and the single-volume The Princeton Companion to Mathematics, both planned for release in fall 2008.

Though Savarese says she recognizes that any reference project intended primarily for library use should have an electronic component, the press is still in the process of building products and so for now plans to make its reference titles available electronically primarily through partnerships or licensing arrangements with other companies. The goal, says Savarese, is to “amplify and reinforce the presence Princeton has established with monographs, textbooks, and general-interest books,” as well as to provide a substantial base on which to build.

Since the January 2007 launch of SAGE eReference, SAGE's print/e-releases have included the five-volume Encyclopedia of Environment and Society (Aug. 2007), the five-volume Encyclopedia of Business Ethics and Society (Oct. 2007), and the forthcoming two-volume Encyclopedia of Obesity (Feb. 2008).

SAGE's Rolf Janke says librarians have been asking for specific enhancements to SAGE eReference, which now offers nearly 50 social science titles geared mostly to academic libraries (all SAGE titles are also simultaneously available through Gale Virtual Reference Library). In response and as of this month, all SAGE eReference content will be searchable via Google Scholar. Content will be available to libraries that have already purchased SAGE's e-content; users in libraries that have not purchased SAGE's e-content will receive partial entry and be directed to their library for information regarding print-version availability. [For a review of SAGE's new platform, see eReviews, LJ 11/15/07, p. 81.]

Salem recently discontinued sales through EBSCO of its MagillOnHistory database (EBSCO will continue to support those customers that have subscribed to the database through June 30, 2008, but will not activate any new customers). “EBSCO's History Reference Center has overwhelmed MagillOnHistory in the marketplace, since they are trialed and sold side by side,” explains Salem VP of sales and marketing Peter Tobey. “We think we can do better with this content on our own.”

Salem plans to refashion significantly its historical content online in the same way as its five-volume Magill's Medical Guide. The latter's fourth edition publishes this month (online access will only be available to the purchasers of the print set through December 31, 2010, when the fifth edition will be published).

As for MagillOnLiterature Plus, Salem's fully integrated and enhanced database combining the content of MagillOnLiterature with that of MagillOnAuthors, Tobey says, Salem is pleased with the EBSCO partnership and its Literary Reference Center. MagillOnLiterature Plus will be receiving such additions as the six-volume Magill's Survey of American Literature this fall and the five-volume Critical Survey of Mystery & Detective Fiction in spring 2008.

The Schlager Group, an editorial services company, had been producing reference works for publishers like Facts On File and Gale for years when it launched its own multiformat reference imprint, Schlager, in September. The debut title will be the four-volume Milestone Documents in American History: Exploring the Primary Sources That Shaped America (Apr. 2008). Extensive analysis by more than 75 scholars and historians accompanies prominently featured primary source documents in that work.

The “Milestone Documents” series will be available in print through Salem, the Schlager Group's new distribution partner as of late last month, as well as via Salem's forthcoming electronic distribution platform.

The company is also further investigating pay-per-view offerings. “We are committed to libraries and librarians, so we'll do this in a way that shows respect for our customers and their patrons,” says Neil Schlager, the group's founder and president. “We don't want to entice students to buy our content on a per article basis if the same content is already available to them via their library.” At the same time, he adds, “we want to be able to reach the community of students and researchers whose libraries don't have our content in their collections.”

Thomas Mager, director of product development at Springer, the world's largest publisher of scientific, technological, and medical books, wants it known that librarians' call for online works “covering large and important fields rather than smaller niche works” has been heard loud and clear. “We are now doing exactly that,” he says, “and our 2008 catalog will be reflecting those wishes.” But though Springer's ebook collection now boasts some 20,000 titles, it's still publishing print components and is continually updating its backlist, both in print and through its Online Archives Collection.

Come May 2008, the second edition of Encyclopedia of Cancer, first published in 2001, will be expanded from one volume to four to include all major developments in cancer research and treatment. On its heels will be the five-volume Encyclopedia of Neuroscience, whose scope will range from neurochemistry to computational neuroscience and which will include more than 10,000 entries contributed by 1000-plus experts and covering 43 topic fields. The online editions of both titles will be fully searchable and hyperlinked.

Wilson's got a new tag line: “Less Searching, More Finding.” With its All-Smart Search, not only are bibliographic-record components automatically searched, but Wilson's thesaurus “used for” postings are, too, to ensure relevant entries are not overlooked.

Since Wilson's September unveiling of Current Issues in Health, a full-text database deriving from LJ's 2006 Best Reference pick Current Issues: Reference Shelf Plus, significant additions have followed. These include Graphic Novels: Core Collection (Oct. 2007), which highlights 2000-odd annotated titles plus cover art, and Applied Science & Technology Index Retrospective 1913–1983 and Business Periodicals Index Retrospective 1913–1982 (both Nov. 2007), which are being sold as a combined resource but are also available separately.

In December, Avery Index to Architectural Periodicals will make the scene, along with another art image database, to be released in spring 2008; exact title and coverage will be announced this month.

The new year will mark the release of WilsonWeb 3.0, now available in beta form. The system is being redesigned with enhanced database layouts and searchability and will include, among other features, full-text translation capability—from English into Spanish, Portuguese, French, German, Italian, and Korean—and a frameless interface.

In with the new, onward with the old: Wilson's Harold Regan says the company has nearly completed its electronic conversion of print reference material published as far back as 1890. All WilsonWeb databases will contain librarian-created granular indexing and informative abstracts.