Péter's Digital Reference Shelf
December 2001

Title: Xrefer
URL: http://www.xrefer.com
Publisher: Xrefer.com
Cost: Free
Tested: November 21-24, 2001

The Content

We have been quite spoiled with free, high quality ready reference sources on the Web, although they are mostly from American publishers. Xrefer has changed that lopsided situation by offering more than 50 dictionaries and encyclopedias from such first class British publishers as Oxford University Press, Penguin, Bloomsbury and Macmillan and its imprints. Xrefer does not merely hoard a large number of highly respected ready reference publications under one roof, it also integrates them in an intelligent way. The equally excellent Bartleby.com site offers a similar integration for prime American ready reference sources.

Because of the unprecedented large number of components, Xrefer groups the titles into categories by genre and subject, allowing searches to be limited to one of them which helps to keep the results manageable. In almost each category there are many mouth-watering titles. In the art category, for example, you will find Bloomsbury Guide to Art next to the Oxford Dictionary of Art. These are followed by six reference titles on business and law from Oxford University Press and Penguin., which are, in turn, followed by Bloomsbury Dictionary of Contemporary Slang, Penguin's Rhyming Dictionary and the Pocket Oxford Dictionary of Current English. The first screen of sources alone ends with such venerable titles in the encyclopedia category as the Oxford English Reference Dictionary, the Oxford Paperback Encyclopedia and the Macmillan Encyclopedia. This is just an appetizer followed by a second and third screen of highly respected reference titles covering practically all subject areas.

This resource line-up is as fascinating as when the football (that is soccer) team of England picks the best players for the World Cup from Arsenal, Leeds United, Manchester United and Chelsea teams. The beauty of this team is that Xrefer.com turns out to be a very efficient coach, getting the components to work well together, with passes and assists beyond the individual mastery of dribbling and scoring. And, of course, you are spared the depravity of football hooliganism which has been an embarrassing export from the UK, just as the term itself.

Given the numerous components in this database, I didn't follow my usual process of testing dictionaries and encyclopedias with a test collection of nearly 150 words, expressions, concepts and phenomena. Instead, I illustrated the power of this integration, or rather synergy, by using a single example: Arthur Koestler, the controversial novelist, journalist and philosopher.

You can find biographies of him in other high quality free encyclopedias and dictionaries, but none of them compares with the richness of the combined resources of Xrefer. Far and away, the best among the alternatives is the Columbia Encyclopedia which has a decent entry about Koestler. However, it does not mention that he studied in Vienna, Austria, traveled to a dozens of countries beyond the few mentioned, including the United States where he also lived for several years after the remarkable success of his most well-known novel, Darkness at Noon, which was brought to Broadway.

Also missing from the Columbia Encyclopedia entry is reference to his terminal leukemia and Parkinson's disease which motivated his suicide. His wife, Cynthia Jefferies, who joined him in his suicide although she was physically fit as a fiddle, gets a mention only as "wife" without her name. The Koestler endowed Parapsychology Department at the University of Edinborough is not mentioned either in the Columbia Encyclopedia.

The Biography.com site of A & E has a short, moderately informative entry about Koestler. It includes some of the facts omitted from the Columbia Encyclopedia entry, but does not mention his imprisonments, communist membership, disappointment in Zionism or his extensive travels, all of which had a very significant impact on his novels. Furthermore, only two of his books get mentioned.

The free Concise Encyclopaedia Britannica offers only a 45-word teaser. The full entry is only available for subscribers, but it does not paint a full picture of him either. To the credit of the free Britannica site, it has excellent and very informative full text reviews of a fairly recent biography (The Homeless Mind) about Koestler. The reviews together make up a remarkable biography, but obviously this may apply only in a very few cases. Finally, the free subset of Encarta does not have an entry about him at all (although the Deluxe version does contain one).

Xrefer comes up with 43 entries in response to searching all the sources in the collection using Koestler as a search term. Because the engine searches the entire text of all the entries, there will be articles where Koestler is mentioned in the recommended further reading section, or just passingly as the author of a sentence to illustrate a word's usage, or in the oeuvre of a musician which includes a composition for the Broadway version of a Koestler novel.

Eight sources have entries, often multiple entries, about Koestler where his name is the main entry, while the rest are entries about his works or people, organizations and publications he was associated with, such as Albert Camus, the literary review Encounter or the Royal Society of Literature.

The Koestler main entries come from prime ready reference sources. None of them are complete (and as mentioned above, neither are the competitors'), but together they come very close to a comprehensive biography. Inquiring minds will find it interesting to put together the complete picture of him from the biographies and the quotations, which give some insights into his thinking and attitude. Good reference librarians will also appreciate the chance to corroborate from several sources in one search some of the data that may raise doubts, such as Koestler's membership in the Communist Party.

The Bloomsbury Dictionary of English Literature has perhaps the most informative entry which mentions, for example, that he was imprisoned both in Spain and France and served in the notorious Foreign Legion (where he probably picked up some of his infamous brutality). These are not mentioned in any of the other free ready references sources. The entry also lists 13 of his books, mentions his Parkinson's disease, leukemia and advocacy of euthanasia. This source is the only one that gives the full name of his wife who -- let's face it -- sacrificed her own life to facilitate his suicide. The Bloomsbury Biographical Dictionary nicely rounds out the biography with six quotations.

The Oxford Paperback Encyclopedia is rather terse, starting his biography from the time he settled in England. It does mention the endowed chair he funded at the University of Edinburgh, as does another Oxford publication, the English Reference Dictionary. There is significant overlap between these two resources.

The entry in the Oxford Companion to English Literature provides additional biographical details, lists some of the countries and regions he visited and identifies seven books of Koestler. On the other hand, it only mentions that he committed suicide, ignoring his wife completely, and merely referring to his belief in euthanasia. The Oxford Companion to English Literature does deserve credit for the four main entries about Koestler's books and about the Royal Society of Literature of which Koestler was a so-called Companion.

In the other Oxford family of publications contained in Xrefer, Oxford Who's Who in the Twentieth Century is the most comprehensive. It has much new information, especially the most comprehensive (but certainly not complete) list of countries and cities which he visited, and his membership in the German Communist Party, although dating it from 1930 when most other sources peg his formal affiliation, which he very much regretted later, as 1932. We also learn from this entry that Cynthia (with no last name given) was his third wife. This is not merely a gossip morsel, but is relevant from the perspective of his controversial, quite rocky and less than gentle relationship with women which contradicts the image he liked to project in his essays and novels. The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations rounds out the Oxford collection in Xrefer with five quotations from Koestler.

The Macmillan Encyclopedia entry has a good record about Koestler, identifying ten of his books, but not mentioning any of his travels, his view about euthanasia nor the Koestler endowment chair. It dates his communist membership from 1931 to 1938. This variety of sources presents unavoidable redundancy, but the records enhance each other and the collection forms a formidable ensemble through an intelligent software feature.

The Software

The software offers some options, but could do more to enhance the precision of searches. The simplest search is initiated by entering one or more terms and letting the software do a cross-database search. This kind of all-out search is good when you want to leave no stone unturned, but may bring up many irrelevant results when the name of the person is quite common, like Taylor. Phrase searching is now possible by putting the query between double quotes, i.e. using "Elizabeth Taylor", which is essential to avoid false drops. This is also useful when different word orders have different meanings, like "surgeon general" versus "general surgeon." You do have to be careful. While Arthur Koestler (no quotes) retrieves 35 records, "arthur koestler" (in double quotes) finds only 9 records because his name often appears in reverse order, i.e. "Koestler, Arthur" that does not match the exact query format.

Xrefer offers a unique combination of expensive human (intellectual) indexing and inexpensive but fast computer indexing that allows the user to have choices.

Once you find a relevant entry, such as a biography, you will find on the side a list of see also entries that do not merely mention the person in passing, but are related to the person in one way or another. They may be additional biographies, reviews of his/her work(s) or quotations by and about the person. The digital versions of the book indexes, which are created by indexing specialists, are compared against the header term of the entry being displayed and only the guaranteed matches on that entry are listed. As the number of resources will keep growing in Xrefer, the value of this savvy feature will be more and more appreciated by users.

The software also has a nice feature that eliminates many of the problems caused by misspellings. The query Marilyn Monroe, for example, retrieves 62 articles. If you misspell it as merilyn monroe, merylin monroe or marilin monroe you get no results. However, if you put a tilde (~) in front of the query term, it initiates a fuzzy search and retrieves the same 62 articles.. Trying Monroe alone would not be too good because it will retrieve 68 articles about other Monroes. True, using the fuzzy search also retrieves irrelevant items, but they are easy to spot and skip in the result list.

The fuzzy search features is particularly useful with romanized Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Arabic and Slavic names because the different sources use different transliteration rules. One of the most maddening searches in my practice has been the one about the president of Libya. The combinations of the variant spellings of his first name and last names yield dozens of formats. Using khadaffi alone yields no result. Put the tilde before his last name and ~khadaffi retrieves several articles, including those that spell his name as Gaddafi, Qaddafi and even the format Gadaffi. Yes, it also retrieves Khadijah, the first wife of Prophet Mohammed, but the false drops are negligible penalties in exchange for the relief of the agonizing guessing games of how a name might be spelled in a database or archive.

It would be nice to be able to sort the search results, but even more important would be the option to allow users the ability to choose more than one category of reference sources. One wonders whether to choose the art category or the encyclopedia category when searching about, say, Salvador Dali. The former has 9 entries and the latter has 19 related to the Spanish artist. True, doing a search across all the sources at once eliminates this problem, but in cases where a personal name is also a noun or adjective it may bring up way too many irrelevant entries. According to the help file, the search may be limited to headings in the articles by using h:, such as h:koestler, but in my test searches this option did not change the result set.

In an ideal situation, the users should be able to customize the sources to be searched, but that is too much to ask from a splendid ready reference collection.

A fee-based version with many additional resources and more versatile software features was being beta tested at the time the manuscript was submitted, but by very early next year an operational version is likely to be available for libraries.