Off the Shelf: Encyclopedia.com.

Sat, 21 Nov 2009 20:39:16 GMT

Polanka, Sue (author).
FEATURE. First published September 15, 2009 (Booklist).

Fall is in the air—football, back-to-school activities, pumpkins, and the annual Reference Books Bulletin “Encyclopedia Update.” This year we get to highlight a new encyclopedia. Gale, part of Cengage Learning, acquired HighBeam Research in December 2008, and with that acquisition, the ownership of a fabulous URL—Encyclopedia.com, a free resource with more than half a million entries on a variety of topics. The best part? The information is from vetted reference sources. In fact, more than 200 dictionaries and encyclopedias are used to verify content on the site, with many more to follow. This is great news for librarians and researchers who want authoritative information from the Web. According to John Barnes, executive vice president, strategic marketing and business development, at Gale, “We hope to work with libraries to create a credible, citable alternative to other reference Web sites.” In just 10 months, it looks like Gale is well on its way to making Encyclopedia.com the library community encyclopedia.

The search experience is rich and diverse. My search for global warming found articles in The Columbia Encyclopedia (2008), Oxford Companion to the Earth (2000), and A Dictionary of Ecology (2004). Each provided the full text and brief citation data. A neat Compare Side-by-Side feature displays all three entries together. In addition to images and graphics, a toolbar provides printing and linking options for services like Facebook and Delicious. The new Essential Reading feature offers related entries, relevant Q & A, and links to free newspaper and magazine articles.Gale will be introducing a variety of products and services this fall, including adding and linking to Gale content, the Access My Library (AML) service, and Smart Q & A.

We all know the drill. Most students look at the top 10 results from a search engine, and vetted library information usually doesn’t fall there. With Encyclopedia.com, Gale hopes to be in the top 10 and become the front door to library resources by linking its content back to libraries. According to Barnes, “Encyclopedia.com has untapped potential to connect users to the library.” To do this, about 10 percent of the content from a variety of Gale resources will be released to search engines for indexing. It could be a full article or snippets of an article but rarely an entire work. In addition to print resources, content from the Gale Virtual Reference Library, Global Issues in Context, GREENR, and Grzimek’s Animal Life Encyclopedia databases will be included.

So how will Gale get the user from the top 10 search results back to the library? Through Access My Library (AML), which been used on the Web for a couple of years and will be introduced to Encyclopedia.com soon. AML users who find an article are currently referred back to a local library based on their zip code. With Encyclopedia.com, referrals will be made based on the IP address of the user’s computer. AML will have many new features as well, including statistics on the number of referrals and attempted referrals to the library; marketing services for libraries; options for users to sign up for a public library card at one’s locality; and others that will be announced at the launch. Barnes states, “Gale believes strongly that it is essential that we help connect libraries to the many users who start in search engines on the open Web. That is why we launched the initial version of AML several years ago. AML has reintroduced millions of Web users to the resources in their local libraries.”

Another Encyclopedia.com service will be Smart Q & A, which is now in a Beta version. Smart Q & A will create a knowledge bank for reference questions and answers. Currently, there are more than 250,000 questions and answers, all with citations from vetted reference sources, and Gale hopes to grow this bank to more than a million questions. A nice example of this can be seen through a search for “Who founded Detroit?” WikiAnswers states, verbatim, “some dead french guy.” Yahoo! Answers sends the question into a series of log-ins and categories with a point system. Enough said about that. Encyclopedia.com provides a full answer and cites its source, The Concise Dictionary of World Place-Names. There will be opportunities for libraries to contribute to Smart Q & A as well, receiving “credit” through a link to the library site. Just think of the special-collection materials libraries can bring to the surface with Smart Q & A. Barnes states, “We are excited by the opportunity to work with libraries to develop an authoritative, citable, trustworthy reference site for Web users that connects them into the vast resources of their libraries.”

Encyclopedia.com should prove to be an excellent resource for researchers and for libraries. If awards are any indication, it’s already gotten one: it is the 2009 CODiE Award winner for Best Online General Reference Service. CODiE is a Software & Information Industry Association award, the only peer-reviewed award in the industry. It celebrates achievement and vision in software, education technology, and digital content. Let’s hope that with the right vision, technology, and content, Gale, partnering with libraries, can create the best encyclopedic source on the Web, one that reminds users of the importance of reference sources and leads them back to the library, where the most authoritative information resides.

Sue Polanka is Head of Reference Instruction, Paul Laurence Dunbar Library, Wright State University, Dayton, Ohio. For more on e-books, check out her blog,No Shelf Required.

Booklist Online - Off the Shelf

Off the Shelf: Encyclopedia.com.