eReviews

Routledge, www.reference.routledge.com/public/politics.htm

The Routledge Politics and International Relations Resource is a database containing (at the time of this review) 34 Routledge reference works on politics and international relations, including A Dictionary of Human Rights, Dictionary of Terrorism, Encyclopedia of the World's Minorities, and The Terrorism Reader, to name just a few (planned upcoming titles include The Politics of Oil and Encyclopedia of Globalization). Updated annually, the file contains open URL bibliographic references, downloadable MARC records, and has COUNTER-compliant statistics. At present time, two Reference Resources Online are available—this title and The Routledge Religion Resource. If your institution subscribes to multiple resources, they are fully cross-searchable.

HOW DOES IT WORK? The main screen has a Search box in the upper right corner, with a navigation bar beneath it containing a Home button, a Books button (to browse by book title), an Entries button (to browse by entry/article heading), a Subjects button to browse by subject classification, an Advanced Search button, and a Help button. It's clean, uncluttered, and very functional.

CAN YOU USE IT? The file contains some titles I've been wishing for in e-form for some time, so I waded right in. My first search was for "human rights violations sudan," for which I got 37 results, ranging from a 1300-plus word article on Sudan to an article on John Garang de Mabior, another article on genocide, another on ethnic conflict, and the article "Understanding the Muslim Mainstream." The length of each article is given in the results list (a very nice touch), and it's easy and clear how to move within the results both at the list level and at the individual article level. At the bottom of each article is an explicit citation (in MLA style) for the online article—another nice touch, adding value.

The articles themselves are extremely well written, as one would expect from a Routledge resource. I do have concerns about the datedness of some material. For instance, The Terrorism Reader shows in its notes no source later than 2002. That's pretty dated information for those researching terrorism. So I looked at the information about the book more closely and saw that the version available online is the 2003 second edition. But there is a third edition (which came out in 2007) of this book available—I know because my library has it. So I have to ask: Why isn't the latest version included in the online file?

I went into Advanced Search next and was a little surprised to see that it's quite different from other systems' Advanced Search because it again features a single search box but allows you to search within: Headings, the Full Text, Names of people in headings, Names of people in bibliographies, or Names of works in bibliographies. It then lists all the books to which you have access online through your subscription or trial and lets you Select All, Deselect All, or choose to search them one by one (this latter option is a bit time-consuming, especially if you are subscribed to more than one Resource).

When I tried an Advanced Search for the word massacre in Full Text, I got 303 results—way too many for me to go through. However, when I tried another Advanced Search for the same word in Headings, I got nine results. Then I went back to the longer list of 303 and found a number of hits that were of interest, but I would have to be pretty imaginative to coax them out of that longer list successfully. In other words, Advanced Search needs more work.

Then I tried to Browse Entries. I entered the word massacre in the Browse box and got one entry, for the Massacre of Tlatelolco. I moved on to Subjects, and I have to admit, I got lost. The Subjects listed for my Resource included, among many others, Introductory Politics, Asian Politics, British Politics, Comparative Politics, Environmental Politics, and so on. When I chose Asian Politics, I got a list of 11 books within the Resource, and when I chose Southeast Asian Politics from the sublist, I got one book to browse: the Dictionary of the Modern Politics of South-East Asia. Perhaps this will make more sense when there are a lot more titles in the list, but for now I'd rather Routledge concentrated on beefing up their search capability and make it more powerful and more sophisticated.

WHAT'S THE COST? Pricing for academic and public libraries begins at $1300 for an annual subscription and ranges to a high of $4,485 (academic libraries with FTE over 50,000 may pay more, as may public libraries serving populations over 1,000,000).

HOW GOOD IS IT? The file gets an eight in its present implementation, and that's based on its solid content. The interface is nicely spare but needs to offer more targeted searching.

BOTTOM LINE Recommended for libraries not owning the print. Others should wait until Routledge works some of the kinks out of their technology before subscribing.