Witte.indd Selected Reference Works, 2005 Sarah Witte and Mary Cargill This article follows the pattern set by the semiannual series initiated by the late Constance M. Winchell more than fifty years ago and continued first by Eugene Sheehy and then by Eileen McIlvaine. Because the purpose of the list is to present a selection of recent scholarly and general works, it does not pretend to be either well balanced or comprehensive. A brief roundup of new editions of standard works is provided at the end of the articles. Code numbers (such as AC527) have been used to refer to titles in the Guide to Reference Books, 11th ed. (Chicago: ALA, 1996). Library Catalogs The European Library [electronic resource]. The Hague: European Library Office, 2005. www.theeuropeanlibrary.com. Free. Gabriel, formerly the directory of Euro- pean national libraries, has become the online union catalog of European libraries under a new name: The European Library. It is now possible to search a single library catalog, several catalogs, or the catalogs of all forty-three member libraries at once. It also is possible to search subsets of li- brary catalogs: one can search the entire British Library Integrated Catalogue or only DigCIM, the library’s Digital Catalogue of Illuminated Manuscripts. There are simple and advanced search modes; the advanced search includes field-specific searches (title, author, subject, type, format, language, ISBN, and ISSN). There are four initial search boxes, but the user has the option to add more fields. Terms in multilingual searches must be typed in the original languages. There are no multilingual subject headings or automatic translat- ing of search terms, though the search and information screens can be set to English, French, or German. Browsers that support XSLT should work fine. Apple Macintosh computers are cur- rently not supported, but the work is in progress. In addition to the union catalog and the library directory, the site offers a virtual museum of treasures of the libraries. The treasures cover the whole range of usual national library holdings from medals and coins to rare book and maps. The treasure chest contains, among other things, an elaborate book binding from the library of Queen Elizabeth I of England, Tycho Brahe’s book on astronomical instruments from Denmark, and the Urbinate Bible, a Florentine miniature masterpiece, in the Vatican Library. Recommended for all types of college and university libraries. This is a free public-access database.—J. S. Sarah Wi e and Mary Cargill are reference librarians in Butler Library at Columbia University; e-mail: spurgin@columbia.edu and cargill@columbia.edu. Although it appears under a byline, this list is a project of the reference departments of the Columbia University Libraries and notes are signed with the initials of one of the following staff members: Seth Kasten, Burke Library; Jean Laponce, Anice Mills, Bob Sco , and Junko Stuveras, Butler Library; Elizabeth Davis, Music Library; Kathleen Dreyer, Business and Economics Library. 177 mailto:cargill@columbia.edu mailto:spurgin@columbia.edu http:www.theeuropeanlibrary.com 178 College & Research Libraries March 2006 Religion Encyclopedia of Religion and Nature. Ed. Bron R. Taylor, et al. London: Thoemmes Continuum, 2005. 2 vols. $395 (ISBN 1- 84371-138-9). LC 2005-440756. In a time when environmental theology may well be the cu ing-edge subject of the religious world—and one requiring immediate a ention—this major work on “the relationships between human beings, their diverse religions, and Earth’s living systems” (p. vii) arrives as a welcome aid to researchers. What impact has nature had on religion, and, more urgently, how might religion play a positive role now and in the future in helping the community of life to survive? The range of this work’s nearly one thousand entries—“Aboriginal dreaming (Australia),” “Creation’s fate in the New Testament,” “Dillard, Annie,” “Ecological anthropology,” “Gaian Mass,” “Hudson River School painters,” “Music of resistance,” “Rubber and religion (Bel- gian Congo),” “Water in Zoroastrianism,” “Wonder toward nature”—is impressive and idea provoking. Although the complex relationships among humankind, religions, and ecology and the questions these rela- tionships raise are a challenge to interrelate as a unified discipline, the central purpose of this work can perhaps be reduced to a empting to provide, for the first time, critical and nuanced exploration of these manifestations and relational questions in a relatively convenient format. The editors recommend that most us- ers begin by reading four of the encyclo- pedia’s articles for a broad overview of the subject at hand: “Environmental Ethics,” “Religious Studies and Environmental Concern,” “Ecology and Religion,” and “Social Science on Religion and Nature.” The majority of articles are peer-reviewed scholarly pieces introducing subjects in the objective style of a typical academic encyclopedia; the labeling of others with either an SP (Scholarly Perspectives en- tries) or a P (Practitioner entries) indicator is an editorial feature intended to permit the inclusion of articles clearly identi- fied as being personal or reflective, or expressed by spirituality practitioners in their own words. This perhaps prepares the reader who, coming across “Disney Worlds at war,” an SP-labeled article concerning opposing views of Disney theme park attendees regarding their experiences of the parks, might otherwise be startled to find the author switching to first person singular early in the article to explain why frequent visits to Disneyland beginning early in his Southern Califor- nian life have qualified him to “be an un-Disney-like tour guide.” (A separate article titled simply “Disney” discusses the presentation of nature in the compa- ny’s films and television shows.) Almost all articles include bibliogra- phies, and there is an index. The more than five hundred international contributors, from NGO spokespersons to academics, include some of the leading scholars of en- vironmental ethics. Although the editors acknowledge that they were unable to find appropriate contributors for some subjects (e.g., Antarctica, North Africa west of Egypt), they suggest that the best “test of an encyclopedia’s efficacy is its success in demarcating the territory to be covered and analyzing carefully a representative sample of the phenomena in question” (p. 27). By this standard and more, the Encyclopedia of Religion and Nature has been a successful project.—S.K. Literature Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory. Eds. David Herman, Manfred Jahn, and Marie-Laure Ryan. New York: Routledge, 2005. 718p. $210 (ISBN 0-415-28259-4). LC 2004-051269. As the editors of this volume note, schol- arly interest in narrative, in the study of narrative itself as opposed to individual narratives, has dramatically expanded in the past few decades. First emerging as “narratology” in the late 1960s work of such structuralists as Todorov, Barthes, Gene e, and Greimas, the effort to closely examine the structure and dynamics of nar- rative has by now spread to a wide range of disciplines, including sociolinguistics, Selected Reference Works, 2005 179 psychology, literary studies, discourse analysis, ethnography, communication studies, philosophy, history, medicine, artificial intelligence, and more. It bears witness to the broad and sometimes differ- ent focuses of those many disciplines that Marie-Laure Ryan, one of the editors of this book, seems to sidle fairly uncomfortably into a clear definition of the term narrative itself, seeming to se le for “a common view among narratologists,” whereby narration is “the textual actualization of story” rather than story itself (p. 347), it be- ing understood that the actual medium of expression need not necessarily be a writ- ten text or even any words at all, and that we are talking here not only of fiction, but of all story-telling types of activities. She is rather more comfortable with descriptive approaches, citing several, but leading off with David Herman’s description of narra- tive as “a fundamental way of organising human experience and tool for construct- ing models of reality” (p. 345). Enlisting the talents of established scholars in various disciplines, the book aims to take stock of this complex field, to serve as a “universal reference tool, providing a comprehensive resource for students and researchers in the many disci- plines drawing on concepts of storytelling and using methods of narrative analysis,” and it accomplishes this task admirably. The text consists of about 450 entries, arranged in alphabetical order. The essays are of five types: 3,000- and 1,000-word discussions of “major” or “important” topics, concepts, approaches, and forms of narrative, covering such things as “inde- terminacy,” “cultural studies approaches to narrative,” and “magical realism”; 500- and 200-word entries on particular genres, technical terms, and key ideas (e.g., “ekphrasis,” “historicism,” and “romance novel”) and brief thumbnail definitions of terms such as “intradiag- etic narrator,” “Constance School,” and “hypertext.” There are no biographical entries, though the work of major figures is extensively discussed in the text of individual subject entries. All the essays other than the thumbnail definitions include brief, but substantive, listings of key literature. There are a variety of tools to assist in navigation through the text: numerous cross-references, listings of contents by title, broad subject area, and author (with typographical conventions to indicate whether the items listed are major articles, minor articles, or defini- tions), and a well-designed index. This is an important reference work that belongs in virtually every major research library’s collection. It will no doubt serve as a useful introduction to many unfamiliar with the field as well as a valuable aid to the specialist wishing to track developments in other disci- plines.—R.H.S. Encyclopedia of Women’s Autobiography. Eds. Victoria Boynton and Jo Main. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 2005. 2 vols. $249.95 (ISBN 0-313-32737-8). LC 2005-008526. This encyclopedia has much to recom- mend it: it is international in scope and includes a good mix of entries for authors, specific autobiographies, genres/styles, nationalities or ethnicities, and key terms. The 190 signed entries are well wri en and long enough to provide a good in- troduction to each topic. Bibliographies at the end of each entry list primary and secondary sources. Appendices list the 114 authors who are profiled individually by ethnicity and in chronological order. There is a comprehensive index. The Encyclopedia of Women’s Autobiog- raphy will be especially useful for its treat- ment of nearly fi y genre and technical terms, including autoethnicity, alterity, voice, embodiment, identity, self-help narrative, and relational autobiography; and for the twenty-seven articles that address women’s autobiography from a national or regional perspective. The encyclopedia’s main weakness is that it cites few of the many bibliographies and reference works that might help students and scholars to locate authors beyond those profiled or mentioned here. 180 College & Research Libraries March 2006 The essay on African American women’s autobiography cites many autobiogra- phies in the text of the article and in the bibliography but does not mention any of the published bibliographies of African American women’s autobiographies that would help researchers locate additional sources. The encyclopedia includes a “Se- lected Bibliography” listing twenty-five books on the subject of autobiography; perhaps future editions of this encyclo- pedia could include a section on reference works and bibliographies.—S.W. Music Sharp, Avery T., and James Michael Floyd. Church and Worship Music: An Annotated Bibliography of Contemporary Scholarship: A Research and Informa- tion Guide. New York: Routledge, 2005. 327p. $85 (ISBN 0-415-96647-7). This annotated bibliography lists 729 items on church music published in the United States from 1960 to early 2004, with some reprints of important prior works as well as a few earlier landmark titles. The authors aim to select literature document- ing music and the sweeping changes in religious groups, individual churches and their worship music, musical styles and types, and preferences of religious leaders, musicians, and the Christian public. The focus is on published works in English, and titles are drawn from monographs, bibliographies, collective biographies, se- lected dissertations, work lists, church and choral music journals, and some journal articles. Fi y-three Web sites complement the published sources. The titles are organized under ten main sections: general music reference; church music reference; church music periodi- cals; historical studies; regional studies; religious and ethnic groups; church and sacred music genres; music ministry; tra- dition, change, and conflict; and church and worship music Web sites. Religions covered stem from the Western European Christian tradition and include Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish denominations. Muslim and other non-Christian faiths are excluded. Titles include literature about church music as well as works related to the music itself (e.g., Organ Music in Print or Organ Preludes: An Index). The annota- tions are both evaluative and descriptive. Phrases such as “Needs to be updated” or “More than a catalog” provide infor- mative guidance. As a result, this work is useful for the scholar as well as the performer. Extensive subject, author, and title indexes conclude the work.—E.D. Jenkins, Todd S. Free Jazz and Free Impro- visation: An Encyclopedia. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Pr., 2004. 2 vols. $175 (ISBN 0-313-29881-5). LC 2004- 047531. In two introductory essays, the author fleshes out the characteristic style of free jazz on which this work is based. Free jazz encompasses a music style that developed a er World War II and continues to the present. Historically, it has also been referred to as new jazz; the new thing; out jazz; great black music; fire music; creative, improvised music; modern cre- ative jazz; and action jazz. Departing from traditional jazz idi- oms, this music embraced freedom from established musical norms and priorities for its performer/composers. Other char- acteristics include an emphasis on tone color, open ensemble roles, and collective improvisation. An alphabetical list of the 675 entries precedes the text, a necessary guide as cross-references within articles are not included. This list is followed by the same entries organized under three broad categories: artists and groups; record la- bels; and performance venues, including festivals. All the entries reflect diligent research and specialized vocabulary, as well as the author’s informed point of view. Artist entries focus on career whereas topical entries might include a venue’s street ad- dress, major performers, and evaluative information. For example, Jenkins writes of a performer disrespectfully denied ten- Selected Reference Works, 2005 181 ure or his ability to work the greasiness of early jazz. He’ll refer to an album being an underappreciated pearl or a performance venue as one of the city’s most respected venues for outward-reaching music. A year-by-year chronology of related events, as well as significant albums, and suggested readings provide the user with context and avenues for fur- ther information. An extensive index, with cross-references concludes the work. Highly recommended.—E. D. Wlaschin, Ken. Encyclopedia of Opera on Screen: A Guide to More Than 100 Years of Opera Films, Videos, and DVDs. New Haven: Yale Univ. Pr., 2004. 872p. $75 (ISBN 0-300-10263-1). LC 2004- 041519. This encyclopedia of about 2,500 entries is devoted to opera singers and operas that have appeared in films or on vid- eocasse es, DVDs, or Laserdiscs since 1896. Entries are organized alphabetically and include operas, opere as, zarzuelas, singers, composers, writers, conduc- tors, stage directors, TV directors, opera houses, cities, production groups, and related subjects. Aiming at inclusiveness, entries in- clude works composed for film and television (i.e., operas that exist only in electronic format, operas with cinema content or, inversely, films with operatic content). Operas are listed in their original language, except for Slavic titles, which are given in English. Entries on composers include screen biographies and cross-references to the operas that have been filmed or taped. Entries on singers include descriptions of their concert videos and cross-references to their screen operas. Singers whose op- era career was only on the movie screen also are treated. Entries on persons and performing groups include a brief career survey followed by a chronological list of titles with brief descriptions. In addition to the chronological entries of the screen versions of operas, there are entries on films of related interest that ei- ther use music from an opera or are based on the same story. Because early and silent versions are of more specialized interest, they are listed a er later versions. Inter- estingly, Carmen has the largest number of screen versions, Mozart has the larg- est number of screen biographies, and Verdi has the largest number of different operas. The most prolific director of opera on film is Carmine Gallone. Cross-references are indicated in small caps in individual entries throughout the volume. Extremely useful is the alpha- betical listing of subjects preceding the entries and the back-of-the-book index to names of persons and works that were not the subject of individual entries.—E.D. Business Sports Business Research Network [SBRnet]. Princeton, N.J.: Sports Busi- ness Research Network. h p://www. sbrnet.com. Subscription price varies. The Sports Business Research Network [SBRnet] database provides searchable news and market research from the National Sporting Goods Association and other industry sources on aspects of sporting goods, sports equipment, partici- pation, broadcasting, and marketing. The market research section is or- ganized by sport (baseball, football, soccer, etc.) and contains statistics from the National Sporting Goods Associa- tion (consumer market size, distribution channels, brand share, consumer demo- graphics, and sports participation); the U.S. Department of Commerce (sporting goods imports); and professional sports a endance. The market research data also include tables that combine statistics for the U.S. market for consumer expendi- tures for all categories, participation for all sports, and sporting goods imports. A endance at sporting events is also tracked in this database. Team-by-team in- formation is available for some sports since the early 1990s, total only for others. The publications database provides access to news and features dealing with all aspects of the business of sports. Pub- http:sbrnet.com 182 College & Research Libraries March 2006 lications cover a diverse range of subjects including sporting goods, broadcasting, sponsorship, sports marketing, broadcast- ing, and new media. SBRnet has an intuitive user interface database; li le instruction is needed to use this product. The data are well organized and easy to find and understand. This database is a reliable resource for mar- ket research data on the sporting goods industry. It is recommended for large colleges and universities.—K. D. History Sypolt, Larry N. Civilian Conservation Corps: A Selectively Annotated Bibliog- raphy. (Bibliographies and indexes in American history, no. 52). Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2005. 228p. $89.95 (ISBN 0-313-31313-X). LC 2005-009813 McFadden, Jackie, and Jean Wells. The Civilian Conservation Corps: A Bibliogra- phy. Lewiston, NY : Edwin Mellen Pr., 2005.141p. $99.95 (ISBN 0-7734-6100- 0). LC 2005-047852. The CCC was one of President Roosevelt’s most successful New Deal programs, providing jobs and salaries for approxi- mately three million men from 1933 to 1942. These two bibliographies are very similar in scope because both list primary and scholarly works on the program writ- ten from 1933 to 2003. The arrangement, however, differs widely. Sypolt’s compilation is arranged by eighteen broad topics, ranging some- what confusingly from subjects (his- tory, African Americans, etc.) to types of material (government documents, for example.) Where will a reader expect to find government documents on African Americans? Apparently not under the subject because Sypolt lists a reference to a 1940 publication by the CCC entitled The Civilian Conservation Corps and Colored Youth in the government documents sec- tion, with no cross-references from the African American section. (Unfortunately, there is no subject index to help; there is an author index, but many of the entries are anonymous.) The bibliographic in- formation is a bit skimpy; WorldCat says this publication is a five-page pamphlet, issued by both the CCC and a conference on Negro youth, wri en by Edgar Brown in 1939, information potentially useful in the bibliography. The McFadden and Wells bibliography is arranged strictly by type of publication (government documents, articles, books, etc.), and within each chapter by year, and then alphabetically by author, or if there is no author, by title. There is a subject index for broad topics, which does make finding items easier. The chronological arrange- ment does make it comparatively easy to find listings of primary materials, a familiar request. Unfortunately, neither bibliogra- phy allows for easy identification material related to individual states.—M.C. Encyclopedia of Modern French Thought. Ed. Christopher John Murray. New York; London: Fitzroy Dearborn, 2004. 713p. $175 (1-57958-384-9). LC 2003-014408. The Encyclopedia of Modern French Thought succeeds admirably as a guide to the “wealth of ideas” generated by French thinkers in the twentieth century. Its 234 entries, which range in length from 1,000 to 5,000 words, are wri en by specialists in fields such as history, law, literature, philosophy, political science, sociology, and theology. Consistently clear, but not oversimplified, this thoughtfully edited reference work will effectively serve the needs a broad range of readers and re- searchers. The encyclopedia discusses prominent participants in twentieth-century French intellectual affairs, including thinkers not French by birth or otherwise long- term residents of France. This approach permits the inclusion of foreign-born residents of France as well as francophone intellectuals from French colonies or for- mer colonies such as Frantz Fanon, and expatriates such as René Girard. Quebe- cois thinkers, however, are omi ed due to their largely independent historical and cultural circumstances. In addition Selected Reference Works, 2005 183 to discussions of individual thinkers, the Encyclopedia of Modern French Thought also provides approximately sixty thematic or subject entries dealing with topics such as the philosophy of science, French colonial thought, and poststructuralism. One of the most compelling features of this reference work is the way individual thinkers are discussed. Such entries begin with a signed interpretive essay, followed by shorter sections providing essential biographic and bibliographic informa- tion. Freed from the need to cover basic information in their essays, the authors who contributed to the encyclopedia are able to evaluate their subjects with an immediacy and level of engagement o en lacking in reference works. Inevitably, in a single volume work of this kind, readers will question certain omissions. For instance, Le Corbusier, François Jacob, and Jean Monnet are not discussed, and there is insufficient refer- ence to medical, scientific, and technologi- cal issues. One also might question why a series of informative entries providing historical coverage for the period ca. 1870– 2000 was le buried in the text rather than more usefully included with other intro- ductory material. Overall, however, such concerns detract li le from the general ex- cellence of this reference work. Readers of the Encyclopedia of Modern French Thought will most likely find it to be a useful and stimulating guide to an intellectual tradi- tion that has had a profound impact on modern culture. One is le with the hope that the publishers of this encyclopedia are planning similar works devoted to the modern intellectual and cultural achieve- ments of other nations. —J.L. The Encyclopedia of New York State. Eds. Peter Eisenstadt and Laura-Eve Moss. Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse Univ. Pr., 2005. 1921p. il maps $95 (ISBN 0- 8156-0808-X). LC 2005-001032. Following the popular Encyclopedia of New York City (New Haven: Yale Univ. Pr., 1995), the Empire State now has its own encyclopedia. Despite some corporate sponsorship, this encyclopedia has far fewer conspicuous entries on business corporations than the Encyclopedia of New York City. Typical articles are relatively short, about 150 to 300 words. They are signed and accompanied by a bibliography. Some key topics (agriculture, the state court system, colonial New York, September 11, 2001, state parks, New York City) are given more extensive coverage: six pages or longer and more titles in the bibliogra- phy. This is a collaborative enterprise of a number of contributors, assisted by the sizable editorial staff. The entries range from biographies and place names to special topics. Place names are not limited to large cities and famous resorts, and include counties, towns, and villages. Special topics are discussed in concise articles and would provide a good starting point for research not only for college students, but also for specialists in other fields. The encyclopedia contains many black-and-white photographs and illustrations, historical population statis- tics of counties and cities, useful maps and tables. Libraries that own the editions of the Encyclopedia of New York (St. Clair Shores, Mich.: Somerset Publishers, 1st–4th eds, 1982–2000) would likely want to update their holdings by adding this new schol- arly encyclopedia.—J. S. Encyclopedia of Nineteenth-Century Thought. Ed. Gregory Claeys. New York: Routledge, 2005. 549p. $225 (ISBN 0-415-24419-6). LC 2004-046771. According to its editor, the Encyclopedia of Nineteenth-Century Thought offers “a series of incursions into a vast, complex, and ever-contested arena of ideas,” rather than a systematic survey of intellectual activity during the period 1800–1914. Acknowledging the inability of encyclo- pedic undertakings to achieve universal coverage seems to be de rigueur these days. However, this generally successful single-volume reference work reflects no lack of editorial ambition; in fact, it might 184 College & Research Libraries March 2006 have benefited from a empting to cover less, not more, cultural and intellectual terrain. The Encyclopedia of Nineteenth-Century Thought consists of just over 200 entries, the majority devoted to a relatively pre- dictable selection of writers and thinkers. Few of these “biographical” entries are less than 800 to 1,000 words long, and particularly influential thinkers such as Darwin, Nietzsche, and Marx are typically accorded essays of roughly 2,500 to 3,000 words. In addition, roughly forty essays discuss major topics such as “Feminism and the Female Franchise Movement,” “Industrialism, Poverty, and the Working Classes,” and “Main Currents in Philoso- phy.” All biographical and topical entries are supported by brief, but thoughtfully selected, suggestions for further reading. The topical essays (on average 4,000– 5,000 words long) are one of the great strengths of the Encyclopedia of Nineteenth- Century Thought. The essays allow for relatively detailed discussions of the con- texts in which nineteenth-century writers and thinkers operated. In the process, they also help to distinguish this ency- clopedia from a work it otherwise closely resembles, Justin Wintle’s excellent, but more strictly biographical, Maker’s of Nineteenth Century Culture, 1800–1914. At times, when discussing Kant, for instance, the topical essays duplicate information already provided in biographical entries. More often, however, they help com- pensate for puzzling omissions, such as the lack of biographical entries for Gall, Gauss, and Hemholtz, to cite only three examples. Besides such omissions, if there is one area in which the Encyclopedia of Nineteenth-Century Thought falls short, it is in its somewhat perfunctory a ention to non-Western thinkers. A series of use- ful topical essays survey intellectual and cultural developments in China, India, Islam, and Japan (with Africa and South America essentially overlooked). Beyond that, however, li le space is accorded to individuals who contributed in signifi- cant ways to those national or religious traditions. Given the difficulties involved in producing a substantial single-vol- ume encyclopedia devoted exclusively to nineteenth-century Western thought, the additional challenge of describing intellectual and cultural developments elsewhere might be er have been avoided in favor of more complete coverage of Western thought in such fields as science, medicine, and mathematics. Some further miscalculations worth mentioning are the lack of a table of contents (an annoyance in the case of an encyclopedia that contains topical as well as biographical entries) and the absence of any information concerning the professional backgrounds and institu- tional affiliations of most contributors. Such caveats notwithstanding, the Encyclopedia of Nineteenth-Century Thought can be strongly recommended as an ad- dition to college and university reference collections. There exists a strong need among undergraduate and graduate researchers for reference works orga- nized according to specific time periods and identifiable national and cultural traditions. Particularly if viewed as a survey of European thought, this ency- clopedia will prove to be a dependable, up-to-date, and frequently stimulating guide to the remarkable intellectual and cultural achievements of the nineteenth century.—J. L. Mutch, Deborah. English Socialist Peri- odicals, 1880–1900: A Reference Source. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005. 439p. $99.95 (ISBN 0-7546-5205-X). LC 2004-026892. This bibliography lists all serialized fic- tion, short stories, poetry, drama, and children’s literature published in England in thirty-nine socialist periodicals. It also lists reviews, manifestos, cartoons, and advertisements, as well as articles and letters to the editor that deal directly with socialism or the British socialist movement. What has been “consciously excluded from this reference source are the debates over women’s place in social- Selected Reference Works, 2005 185 ism and society; the political perspective on the New Woman debate…. Such im- portant debates require a sustained and independent reference source to do the dialogue justice” (p. xv). English Socialist Periodicals is arranged in twelve chapters by format (poetry, drama, cartoons, etc.). Within each chap- ter, citations are listed chronologically by author. Anonymous works, cartoons, and advertisements are grouped by periodical title, and then by date. There has been no a empt to identify anonymous or pseud- onymous authors. This bibliography grew out of Mutch’s doctoral research on the use of serialized periodical literature as a political tool, and her introduction provides a substan- tial scholarly overview of fin-de-siècle English socialist periodical publishing. A list of periodicals gives the publish- ing history and price of each title, and a finding list locates the periodicals in four British libraries, though many of these titles are available in paper or microfilm the United States. An author index com- pletes the book. There is no subject indexing or descrip- tive annotation, but this is nevertheless an extremely valuable resource for historians and students of literature and is recom- mended for all collections supporting re- search in English literature and social his- tory. One hopes that the usefulness of this reference work will inspire a companion work addressing the “woman question” in socialist periodicals.—S.W. Tobacco in History and Culture: An Ency- clopedia. Ed. Jordan Goodman. Farm- ington Hills, Mich..: Charles Scribner’s Sons, an imprint of Thomson Gale, 2005. 2 vols. il. $265 (ISBN: 0-684- 31405-3 (set hardcover) 0-684-31453-3 (e-book). LCCN: 2004-007109. With a focus on history and culture, this encyclopedia distinguishes itself from others on the topic by focusing on the “extensive connections between tobacco and human life” (Pref.). International in scope, the 130 entries in this two-volume set range from prehistory to the present and cover tobacco’s complex relationship with all aspects of society. Tobacco’s effect on agriculture, religion, popular culture, business and economics, world history, and health and medicine is explored in well-wri en entries by scholars in their respective fields. Each entry is signed by one of the 110 contributors and ends with a bibliography for further reading. Handsomely designed and a delight to browse through, the encyclopedia features hundreds of black-and-white photographs, advertising graphics, maps, tables, and graphs throughout as well as eight pages of color plates of photographs and illustrations in each volume. One particularly helpful and a ractive feature is the use of the margins to describe a term or display an image or sidebar to help elucidate adjacent material in the text. Cross-references and an extensive index offer additional entry points to the material. Beginning with a historical time line of tobacco’s use that proceeds from 50,000 B.C.E. to 2004, this appealing encyclope- dia includes a wealth of information both historical and contemporary. It will be a useful resource for students and schol- ars researching the impact of tobacco’s influence on so many different aspects of human society. This set is also available for purchase as an e-book. —A. M. Electronic Book Collections Ebrary [electronic resource]. Mountain- view, Calif.:1999–www.ebrary.com. Price varies, depending on collection subscribed to. The past few years have been marked by the incredibly successful integration of serial content into the scholarly process. Searching and retrieving journal articles from databases has almost become second nature for most serious scholars. Indeed, the challenge for reference librarians today is o en to persuade undergradu- ates that the article they really need is one available just a few steps away in the stacks, but not two clicks away online. http:Calif.:1999�www.ebrary.com 186 College & Research Libraries March 2006 The same cannot be said, however, of electronic books, and particularly of current scholarly monographs. There are some obvious explanations for this fact, and most center on the difference in size between the two genres. To begin with, the large size of a book means that a great deal of publisher capi- tal has been invested in the creation of a single, large intellectual object that needs to be consumed as a whole. Whereas a user who chooses to ignore the property rights inherent in a journal article by shar- ing it with a colleague only incrementally diminishes the possibility that the col- league will choose to acquire the journal issue herself, one who does the same with an electronic book has essentially removed a potential customer, with the real possibility of having a measurable impact on an already precarious profit margin. Hence, when we use e-books, we are usually confronted with a variety of publisher-created protective hindrances to full access (limits on the number of simultaneous users, limits on the amount that can be copied or downloaded, etc.), an understandable tactic, but one that nonetheless discourages readers accus- tomed to being able to access an article whenever they need it and to download it in its entirety. Greater length of exposition also makes it more unlikely that a user will read the entire text online, even though the aforementioned limits on printing and downloading make that a virtual necessity. Until we see the advent of the high-density monitor, reading online will continue to be far less comfortable than working with a printed page. Confronted with this situation, a large percentage of readers are likely to simply give up and go away before they have made full use of the content in front of them. Indeed, given the more fragmentary, episodic reading pa erns that the Internet seems to engender, there are good grounds for wondering what the long-term future of the lengthy monograph may be in any case. Furthermore, in their searching and retrieval of e-books, users are hindered by the low ratio of metadata to data that are characteristic of most of them. Catalogers and indexers can usually provide only a limited number of headings to describe a particular item, yet a book is bound to be about many different things. If one relies on controlled vocabulary alone, one will o en miss the e-book titles of relevance, but, unless one has a powerful search engine and/or a means of quickly maneu- vering through search results, one is likely to be confronted with a mass of irrelevant hits masking the texts of genuine interest. Even a sloppy keyword search is likely to return a relevant online journal article, but that likelihood is much slimmer in the case of an online book. Finally, given the large size of an indi- vidual monograph, any online collection must work hard to reach critical mass before it is genuinely usable as a database. Whereas even a single online journal can hope to represent a li le universe of data on various topics, a collection of books must be fairly large before it can hope to satisfy all comers. Most of the issues above depend on factors beyond the control of the publish- ers and database producers, or at least will require a longer, painful process of reorientation. One issue that does not, however, is the question of the search interface, which, depending on its design, can make an enormous difference in a reader’s ability to make effective use of database content. The ease with which search results can be surveyed and por- tions of text printed or downloaded can likewise make a crucial difference in the ability of a particular collection of ebooks to maintain the a ention of its readers. Arguably, no collection has yet pro- duced an optimal system for working with online books, but admirable progress in this direction is provided by Ebrary, a company that describes its mission as as- piring “to become the global standard for secure distribution, acquisition, and man- agement of valuable authoritative docu- Selected Reference Works, 2005 187 ments over computer networks.” Ebrary offers various collection and subscription options, but Academic Complete, a sub- scription database comprising more than 25,000 titles from university, academic, and organization presses with titles in business and economics, career and general education, computers, engineer- ing, and applied science, the humanities, science, medicine and allied health, and the social and behavioral sciences, and priced on an FTE basis, is probably the most a ractive option for large academic libraries. To put its features in perspec- tive, I offer some comparisons here with three other important scholarly e-book collections: NetLibrary, the ACLS History E-Book Project, and Oxford Scholarship Online. It is true that in terms of critical mass, NetLibrary continues to have a strong lead, at least for those who opt to add all its offerings, although Ebrary also offers a growing range of titles. For example, a search for the word Russia or its permuta- tions in titles in the four aforementioned collections yields the following results: ACLS E-Book Project—13; Oxford Schol- arship Online—5; NetLibrary—531; Ebrary—80. Similar results are obtained by searching for America or its permuta- tions as a title keyword: ACLS—137, Ox- ford—42, NetLibrary—4471, Ebrary—650. (Except for NetLibrary, the searches were done on December 23, 2005, in Columbia’s in-house versions of those databases, but because only some of NetLibrary’s titles are owned by Columbia, this search was done on WorldCat. Because Columbia only subscribes to Ebrary’s academic collection, and I had no access to a full listing of Ebrary titles, it is possible that the difference between the two is not quite as large as it appears here, although I feel confident that, given the character of those collections, NetLibrary’s list of titles would remain by far the largest.) However, in terms of usability, Ebrary seems to offer the best search and retrieval interface overall. Like the others, it, of course, offers the standard Boolean search operators AND, OR, and NOT, but only it and the ACLS History E-Book Project offer a proximity operator, an essential tool for focused searching, particularly in the case of lengthy texts such as books, where the co-occurrence of two terms is frequently significant for retrieval only when the words occur relatively close to one another. The proximity operator in Ebrary, incidentally, is the capitalized word WITHIN followed by a hyphen and the number of words that may separate the two terms. More impressive still, it may be used with nested lists of terms, as in the following example: (teen* OR adolescen*) WITHIN-15 smok*. This is the type of robust search tool that all full-text collections need to have but is all too infrequently encountered in full-text scholarly databases. The History E-Book Project’s proximity operator is somewhat less flexible, allowing searches for only two individual words or phrases at a time and only within one of three prees- tablished ranges of characters. Neither of the others has a proximity operator at all, meaning that searches for two terms are more frequently likely to result in false hits, although Oxford Scholarship Online helps to compensate by limiting the size of the area in which a Boolean search is conducted. It is also worth noting here another important innovation that Oxford Schol- arship Online has made, which promises to overcome one of the other aforemen- tioned problems in using ebooks. In an effort to overcome the classically skimpy amount of metadata accompanying the large amount of data found in any book, the Oxford editors have provided abstracts for each chapter in every book, enabling the database to function more like a collection of articles. One hopes that other publishers will be encouraged to emulate this practice. Ebrary also offers the most usable presentation of search results. When one selects a title from the result list, one is taken to the first hit page, with search terms highlighted in red. An icon at the 188 College & Research Libraries March 2006 top of the screen enables one to move to the next page with hits or to move to the text page in the text. In each of the other databases, the navigation process is a bit more cumbersome. In NetLibrary, for instance, when selecting one of the matching books, the reader must do another search for one search or phrase and then use a supplied bu on to move to each page on which a hit occurs. If the text is presented in HTML, the hit term will be highlighted, but for many, if not all, of the texts presented in PDF format, no highlighting is provided, requiring yet another manual search by the reader’s eye to find the term. In the History E-Book Project, it is possible to see a listing of hits in context for a given title, but then one is taken to a page image where terms are not highlighted. In Oxford Scholarship Online, although the initial view of the data for an individual book indicates the hits in some context, a er reaching the full page HTML display, the user must do a manual search to find instances of the term on that page. However, none of these collections, including Ebrary, provides what is re- ally needed for display of a keyword search across a large collection of full text, particularly for full text bound up in such large packages as books: a simple keyword-in-context display of hits at the outset that would enable the reader to quickly see which instances in the text really represent what he was looking for. This concordance-like type of dis- play could make a critical difference in whether a reader actually makes it to the end of a set of fi y or sixty books that con- tain, somewhere in their text, a particular search term. Having to look into each title individually and then sometimes examine each result page individually is likely to tire all, but the most zealous researcher. Arguably, here, the producers of ebook collections continue to be too constrained by the traditional structure of the book as an object through which one browses page-by-page, rather than taking full ad- vantage of the online database structure to present content in the most effective way possible for easy use. Until recently, the influence of the physical book was one area where the two largest collections, NetLibrary and Ebrary, differed most strikingly, the former fo- cusing heavily on the book as an owned object available to just one user at a time (and indeed unavailable to other users while one person was looking at it) and the la er treating the material as a single subscriber database whose content could be accessed at any time by any user. (To be sure, both now offer the opposite option as well. NetLibrary’s Ebook Essentials of- fers that same kind database approach for a subset of its titles, whereas Ebrary also offers the option of permanent ownership of titles with limited access to one or more simultaneous users.) Both NetLibrary and Ebrary offer some possibility of stored reader notes, Ebrary offering the additional possibility of high- lighting pages, an option facilitated by the uniform pdf format it provides all of the texts in its database. Such tools can be one way to overcome the less comfortable online reading environment by enabling a user to return for a series of visits. In both databases, however, this helpful feature would be greatly enhanced by some easy method for exporting the data here in some uniform format so that it could be easily combined with user notes taken on other sources. The special reader plug-in Ebrary provides for managing its content, includ- ing, no doubt, its ability to prevent more reader capture of text than publishers are willing to countenance, is one of the drawbacks to this particular database. In an age of heightened anxiety about Active-X, pop-up blocking, and browser wars, it is always difficult when a large institution must serve up a resource to a community of remote users that requires some special so ware installation, and one strongly hopes that this will not be a permanent feature of this resource. One final criticism sometimes leveled at collections such as Ebrary and NetLi- Selected Reference Works, 2005 189 brary is that the titles they contain are sometimes not the cu ing-edge scholarly titles most needed for scholarly research. Indeed, alongside major titles from schol- arly presses in both these collections, one o en does find titles of only secondary interest. One suspects that this is not from any lack of interest on the part of either vendor in providing such titles but, rather, on an uncertainty on the part of publishers about how best to make their prime titles available to the online public. The History E-Book Project and Oxford Scholarship Online, it is true, do offer the kind of fine, consistent scholarly quality that such critics are talking about, but as the figures quoted above indicate, they are both far from achieving the kind of critical mass that one would want to find in a broadly usable online database. And however excellent Oxford Scholarship Online might be, one shudders to imagine an online world in which every scholarly publisher would serve their books up to us in a separate database. Obviously, the online delivery of scholarly book literature still has far to go before it finds its optimal form. In reaching that goal, an important role can be played by subscribing libraries and the demands they place on the suppliers of such resources, opting for the models that seem best suited to creating the re- search environment their users need. Our choices as subscribers are likely, in turn, to help scholarly publishers to decide where they should place their offerings. In the view of this reader, the model pre- sented by Ebrary, with broad database approach, critical mass of material, robust search interface, and easy navigation represents one very promising model worthy of closer examination and serious consideration by every major research library.—R.H.S. New Editions and Supplements Several standard reference works have been updated, including the Holidays, Festivals and Celebrations of the World Dic- tionary, which is now in its third edition (Detroit: Omnigraphics, 2005. 906p. $123; 1st ed. 1994). Some 500 holidays have been added to bring the total to nearly 2,500 descriptions of holidays from 100 countries and all 50 states. The tenth, enlarged, edition of O o Leistner’s indis- pensable ITA, International Title Abbrevia- tions of Periodicals, Newspapers, Important Handbook, Dictionaries, Laws, Institutions, etc. has appeared (Munich: Saur, 2005. 3v. $568; 1st ed. 1970. Guide AD22). The Atlas of North America (New York: Oxford Univ. Pr., 2005. 320p. $125) is the revised edition of The United States and Canada (2nd ed. 1975; 1st ed. 1967. Guide BG157). The new publication extends the coverage to Mexico, and state and provincial maps, city maps, and statistical information are included for all three countries. Volume 1, Science, Technology and Medicine, of The New Walford appeared in 2005. It is the first volume of a series that succeeds Walford’s Guide to Reference Material (Guide EA10). The new edition “is broadly simi- lar to John Walford’s [but] its structure and content are quite different” (Pref.). The focus is more on introducing new- comers to the fields, and the arrangement has been simplified. On the popular entertainment front, the second edition of Television Cartoon Shows: An Illustrated Encyclopedia, 1949 through 2003 (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2005, 2v. $75) replaces the 1995 edition, which covers 1949 through 1993, Thanks to cable, there have been some 450 new cartoon shows in those ten years and the new edition includes them all. More television facts can be found in the second edition of the Encyclopedia of Television (New York: Fitzroy Dearborn, 2004. 4v. $595; 1st edition 1997). Updated biographical sources include the second edition of Black Women in America (New York: Oxford Univ. Pr., 2005. 3v. $325; 1st ed. 1994), which has added some 150 entries and updated many others. It also includes essays on topics ranging from cooking to voodoo. Volume XII of the Dictionary of Labour Biography (AH220) was published in 2005. 190 College & Research Libraries As in the previous volumes, the arrange- ment is alphabetical, with no chronologi- cal division, and there is a consolidated list of names in volumes I–XII. The indi- viduals covered in Volume XII emphasize the ethnic and national diversity of the British labor movement, and there was an a empt to include women and those involved in smaller political movements, such as Trotskyism. The New Dictionary of the History of Ideas (New York: Scribner’s, 2005. 6v. $764.50) is a revision of the 1973–74 Dictionary of the History of Ideas (BB29). The new edition, like the first one, concentrates on core Western ideas but has expanded cover- age of “global perspectives and gender inclusiveness.” The second edition of The Oxford Companion to Philosophy (New York: Oxford Univ. Pr., 2005. 1056p. $60; 1st ed. 1995) includes some 300 new entries; many others have been revised. The Encyclopedia of Modern Jewish Cul- ture (London: Routledge, 2005. 2v. $425) is an update of The Blackwell Companion to Jewish Culture (DA177). The new edi- tion places more emphasis on Jewish culture outside America and Europe; it also includes biographical information for both living and deceased individuals. The revised third edition of The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church has ap- peared (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Pr., 2005. 1800p. $125; 1st ed., 1957. BC240). Some articles have been updated, and many of the bibliographies accompanying the entries have been revised. The Crisis of Empire, A.D. 193–377 (Cam- bridge: Cambridge Univ. Pr., 2005. 965p. $220) is volume 12 of the new edition of the Cambridge Ancient History (DA85) and completes the revision. (Vols. 1–2 were issued in a third edition before the new edition, actually the second edition, was complete.) Volume 1, C. 500–C. 700, of the New Cambridge Medieval History (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Pr., 2005. March 2006 1016p. $180) also completes the revision of the Cambridge Mediaeval History (1st ed. 1911–36; 2nd ed. 1966–67; DA157). The second edition of The Oxford Com- panion to the Supreme Court of the United States (New York: Oxford Univ. Pr., 2005. 1239p. $65; 1st ed. 1992; CK187) includes more than sixty new entries on cases that have been decided from 1992 through 2004. Many of the other entries have also been revised and updated. The appendix tables, which contain information about the ser- vice, appointments, and Senate confirma- tions of the justices, also have been updated and, where necessary, corrected. Of special interest is appendix three, “Trivia and tradi- tions of the Court.” The third, revised edi- tion of Chambers Dictionary of World History (Edinburgh: Chambers, 2005. 982p. $50; 1st ed. 1993) provides brief, factual outlines for events from A. D. 1000 to 2000. On a narrower focus, Britain and Tibet 1765–1947: A Select Annotated Bibliography of British Relations with Tibet and the Himalayan States including Nepal, Sikkim and Bhutan (London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2005. 607p. $115) revises and updates to 2003 and greatly expands the 1977 Britain and Tibet, 1765–1947: The Background to the India–China Border Dispute. It lists government publications and early travelers’ accounts, as well as secondary articles, and is a useful introduction to the history of both India and Tibet. The second edition of the Encyclope- dia of Post-Colonial Literatures in English (London: Routledge, 2005. 3v. $450; 1st ed. 1994) has been expanded from two volumes to three. The entries and ac- companying bibliographies have been updated and some 200 new entries and essays have been added. Leo Tolstoy: An Annotated Bibliography of English Language Sources from 1978 to 2003 (Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow Pr., 2005. 311p. $45) updates Leo Tolstoy: An Annotated Bibliography of English Language Sources to 1978, pub- lished in 1979.