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Dictionary of National
Biography on CD-ROM
potted biographies of the famous in searchable database
The DNB is something of a literary institution. It was begun
by Sir Leslie Stephen (Virginia Woolf's father) its editorship has passed
through various distinguished hands, and now the encyclopaedia of the Great
and the Good (or just the well known) makes its debut as a beermat-sized
disk. OUP has attached a search engine to its database, and entries can
be summoned by name, keywords, and subjects, using the usual AND, OR, and
NOT Boolean operators. The search engine works fine - but what about the
content?
It claims to include concise biographies of 'persons living in the British
Isles', though strangely it includes Boris Karloff [latterly a US resident]
because William Henry Pratt (the real name of the man with a bolt through
his neck) turns out to have been born in Camberwell, and educated at Merchant
Taylors.
Most of the entries are amazingly old. The biographical note on John
Donne dates from 1888 for instance, though others are more up to date.
Details of Winston Churchill (Nobel prize for literature, you will recall)
are as 'recent' as 1981.
OUP has not done much here to provide added value so far as its archives
are concerned. There are no pictures, even though the title page gives
references to 'likenesses'- but these are simply hyperlinks to the mention
of paintings in the text. The text is murderously unparagraphed, and I
would strongly recommend increasing the default font size by a couple of
points, otherwise you'll go blind.
Recovering the main article on Tennyson took twenty seconds from a standing
start - only to find the bibliographic note claiming "the only complete
and authoritative life of Tennyson is that by his son ... published in
October 1897", which is likely to alarm serious researchers.
And that's where the problem lies. Since the product is aimed at "college
libraries, history departments [and] journalists", it is unlikely that
any of them would be satisfied with such out-of-date information. The accompanying
booklet does admit that the DNB "reflects the work of the previous century:
a monument of Victorian scholarship but increasingly a primary source rather
than an up-to-date reference book". Potential users are nevertheless likely
to imagine it as such, and they might be forgiven for feeling miffed after
parting with fifty pounds sterling. This really is recycling a database
with a naked commercial purpose. Maybe OUP could print a warning on the
box.
© Roy Johnson 1996
[more articles on software]
Dictionary of National Biography on CD-ROM, Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1995, ISBN 0192683128
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