Péter's Digital Reference Shelf
January 2003

Title: Consulta
Publisher: Gale and Océano Grupo Editorial
URL: http://www.gale.com/pdf/facts/consult.pdf (for information)
Cost: Subscription, price to be negotiated
Tested: January 15-22, 2003

Consulta is in a league of its own with unprecedented breadth of high-quality Spanish-language online reference information through the aggregation of about a hundred renowned encyclopedias, dictionaries, handbooks and almanacs — and then some. This is a must-have resource for public and school libraries serving large Spanish-speaking communities, and for academic libraries with various Latin American and Hispanic studies programs. This review — which is almost three times as long as my usual reviews — cannot do justice to the individual items in the collection, but it at least tries to give an overview, which Spanish-language digital reference sources usually do not get in the mainstream review publications.

Ever since the release of the U.S. decennial census findings, it is well-known that Hispanics are the fastest-growing ethnic group in the U.S. It is lesser-known that, according to the Nielsen//NetRatings survey, Hispanics are the fastest growing ethnic, online home user group. It is even lesser-known that, according to the 2002 National Survey of Latinos by the Pew Hispanic Center, 72 percent of foreign-born Hispanics predominantly speak Spanish, although there is an almost full consensus that immigrants must learn English.

These facts, plus the undoubtedly growing inter-racial/inter-ethnic relationships and interest in everything Hispanic (from salsa to Pedro Almodovar's latest Golden Globe-winning movie to Andean music), predict the growing need for Spanish-language online information services, including online reference sources.

While there have been quite a number of monolingual and bilingual Spanish dictionaries on the Web, other online reference resources in Spanish have been few and far between. Grolier deserves credit as being the first with a very good subscription-based online encyclopedia (Nueva Enciclopedia Cumbre) and a less than good implementation of the bilingual Spanish dictionary (The American Heritage Spanish Dictionary). It was followed by Microsoft's excellent Spanish-language online version of the Encarta Encyclopedia (of which many articles are free to anyone), along with a less than stellar bilingual dictionary and a Web directory. Spain-based Micronet offers the rather small Enciclopedia Universalis and dictionaries with a spiffy interface for about $20 a year. Now, enter Consulta, from Gale and Océano Grupo Editorial.

Content

Consulta offers far more sources than all the above mentioned services combined. Quantity alone would not matter, but most of the resources included are the online reincarnations of respected reference books (some of which were bundled with a CD-ROM edition) popular in Spain, and all the other Spanish-speaking countries. Most of the titles are published by Océano Grupo Editorial, one of the many partners of The Gale Group, which in turn is the distributor of Océano in the U.S. This is important not only for the current release, but also holds the promise of enhancing this Spanish-language digital reference collection with additional Gale and Océano titles in the future, such as with a good quotation dictionary.

Beyond the digital versions of reference books, there are about 60 Spanish-language journals and about 1,500 archive documents (called primary sources, or fuentes primarias, by Consulta; however, because journals are also primary sources, I use the term archive documents for the full text of constitutions, literary classics, letters of historical importance and other similar documents). Although the journals and archive documents are not considered reference sources, it was a wise choice to include them, in spite of the 25 percent overlap of the 60 journals with the ones covered by the InfoTrac ¡Informe! database, as these perfectly complement the traditional reference sources. Grolier and Microsoft do not have such collections bundled with their Spanish-language reference databases.

More than half of the journals (34 of 60) are published in Spain, 13 in Mexico and the rest in the other Latin American countries, except for three that are Spanish-language journals published in the U.S. Apart from some of the general interest magazines, the majority of the journals are in the social sciences, geography, arts, humanities and literature. Given the topical focus of the journal collection, it is somewhat surprising that there are no journals from Argentina, Peru or Chile, three countries well-known for their literary traditions and award-winning poets and novelists. On the other hand, Nicaragua is present with three journals focusing on history and culture.

The archive document collection adds yet another dimension to reference sources. It is eerie to read the noble pledges about freedom of speech and association in the constitutions of countries where generals (and the Generalissimo himself) ruled for decades and who have made the term "junta" an adopted term in many other languages for the concept of military dictatorship. No wonder that the query "dictadura militar" retrieves 526 articles from the reference books subset alone.

The variety of sources is impressive and engaging. It is enlightening to read the biographies of Gabriel García Márquez along with reviews of his magical realism in general and individual masterpieces in particular, as well as lesser-known details of his life and essays about this master of words in literary journals. The great disciplinary variety of reference titles also offers the pleasure of serendipity when I learned, for example, from a search for La Pasionaría, Dolóres Ibarrúri (which I always believed meant "the passionate one" — appropriate knowing her oratorical style) that it is not only her pen name, but also the name of a flower.

General Encyclopedias and Dictionaries

In the general encyclopedia and dictionary category (including general biographical and monolingual Spanish dictionaries), you will find the 20-volume Gran Enciclopedia Interactiva Océano Tematica with universal coverage, the Diccionario Océano de Sinónimos y Antónimos, the Gran Diccionario Enciclopedico Visual and the Diccionario Ilustrado de la Lengua Española. I need to add that not all the sources that include "visual" or "ilustrado" in their titles have images in the digital versions. Then again, others have useful illustrations even if the title of the work does not allude to this, such as the Diccionario de Literatura, which has high-quality photographs of famous persons, like the Nobel-laureate Camilo José Cela.

It is another question that some of the illustrations have less than stellar quality, always appear twice when searching the Galería, repeat the same title in both the header and the footer captions (instead of providing in one of them the location and date information for the piece of art), and occasionally even misidentify a painting.

Frida Kahlo, who is very well-covered in Consulta, painted many self-portraits, which usually bear that title with a qualifier, like self-portrait with a monkey. But this famous art work has its own title: "The Two Fridas." Interestingly, it also appears in Consulta with the correct title in another article.

The general biographical dictionaries (Diccionario de Biografías, Grandes Personajes Universales) have worldwide coverage with a slant to Spanish-speaking countries, and they are current. The Anuário Gallach provides the function similar to the Britannica Yearbooks, to keep the entries up-to-date with current events.

A quick check for a sample of famous or infamous Hispanics who passed away in the past 15 months, such as Joaquín Balaguer, Hugo Banzer, Juan Bosch, Fernand Belaunde and Camilo José Cela, found an entry for each of them with death dates (and almost always with portraits). The only exception was Oscar nominee Katy Jurado. She appears in the credit list of "High Noon" in the volume of El Mundo de Cine, but that's all. Most of my other tests yielded good results, with only three surprising omissions, which I will discuss later.

Arts and Humanities

Consulta really shines when it comes to special encyclopedias, dictionaries, handbooks and manuals. Subject-specific and country-specific reference sources abound. Arts and humanities (including current history) are the forte of the collection simply because, beyond the universal encyclopedias and dictionaries, there are works focusing on world history and the developments of mankind in general, such as the large Historia Universal by the Gallach Institute, and a smaller version by the same name from Océano, the 30-volume Historia de la Humanidad, the Grandes Enigmas de la Humanidad, the period-specific Historia de las Antiguas Civilizaciones, and — at the opposite end of the time scale— the Gran Crónica Océano del Siglo XX and La Historia del Mundo Moderno — which, by the way, is not listed among the items of the collection.

With this abundance it is no wonder that the query term "khmer" brings up a number of substantial articles not only about the Khmer empire, but also about the developments in contemporary Cambodia from top-notch sources, not to mention the other sources informing about the khmer Buddhism and architectural master pieces of the khmer empire.

These general and period-specific sources are complemented by country-specific historical reference works, such as Historia de España, México a través de los siglos and Historia de Argentina, so it is no surprise that you can find a lot of information, for example, about Juan Domingo Perón even when searching for the full name, although a little less than meets the eye due to an annoying software deficiency discussed in the software section.

El Mundo de las Religiones and Las Razas Humanas provide yet another rich layer of encyclopedic reference information in the humanities.

Beyond these outstanding sources there are the country-specific reference works with multidisciplinary information, such as the encyclopedia series for each of the 15 Spanish-speaking Central American and South American countries and Mexico. Chile has not only an encyclopedia dedicated to it, but also a dictionary.

It is quite telling that, with the exception of Spain, you will find that most biographies are about Chileans (867 biographies). For perspective, there are 372 biographies about Mexicans, 321 for Argentineans, 275 for Columbians and 217 for Venezuelans.

It is surprising that there is no country-specific work about Panama, while Mexico and all the Spanish-speaking countries of Central America (Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua) have an encyclopedia in the collection, and so do the Spanish-speaking South American countries, with no exceptions.

Beyond political correctness, it would round out Consulta by having a country-specific work dedicated to the Spanish-speaking countries in the Caribbean, such as the Dominican Republic and especially Cuba — although they are pretty well-covered in the collection with a very few exceptions.

No wonder that the few disappointing results in my sample searches relate exactly to Cuba and the Dominican Republic. For example, there are no main entries about Tomás Estrada Palma, the first president of Cuba (although he is mentioned in a few articles), or Raúl Castro who has been vice president, party secretary and played other roles next to his brother for more than four decades, not to mention that he is the constitutionally designated successor of Fidel Castro — for better or worse. Still, there is only a passing mention of him in an article about Chinese-Cuban relations. For fairness, there are relevant journal articles about him.

I also did not find any mention, let alone a definition in Consulta, for one of my dictionary test words: jinetero/jinetera. This is not merely a slang regionalism for people who base their living on a variety of black-market transactions, but a characteristic trait of every day life in Cuba, so much so that scholarly U.S. journal articles discuss at length the jineterismo lifestyle. Arthur Frommer's guide to Cuba (which misspells the word apartheid but gets the cubanismo right) mentions this issue, and the Harvard Gazette reports that one of the Rockefeller Grant recipients of 2003 does his research about this social phenomenon.

For another of my test words, merengue — the most popular dance in Latin America, which originates from the Dominican Republic and Haiti — there are only eight entries in the reference volumes, and only one of them gives a passing mention to the Dominican Republic in the last sentence of the article. Nor did I find anything about the mouth-watering (but unhealthy) popular food of the Dominican Republic, the yanniqueque, while the staple food for other nations are well-covered in the dictionaries. More about that later, this was just an appetizer.

Arts and artists are also very well-covered — except in the area of contemporary pop music — by such well-known titles as the 8-vol. Historia del Arte; the Grande Museos series for the Louvre, the Hermitage, the Prado, the Vatican, the National Gallery and the museums of Florence (each of which have about 200 reproductions and substantial descriptions for all of them); El Mundo de la Música; and El Mundo del Cine. All of these sources also have illustrations, reproductions and portraits that are mostly available for free on the Web. Still, their incorporation is important when a library limits free roaming on the open-access Web.

The general biographies mentioned earlier are excellent sources for artist information. In addition, in spite of their name the two largest sources of the collection (in terms of the number of words), the Diccionario Literario and the Diccionario de Autores, both by the Italian publishing house Bompiani, cover not only literary works and authors, but also every kind of art and artist, including groups and individuals.

There were three surprising omissions for my battery of test artists. José Carreras did not have an entry in the biographical sources (but had one in the Gran Crónica Océano del Siglo XX), while the other two tenors had their main entries in the Diccionario de Biografías.

More disappointingly, there was nothing about multiple Grammy winner Tito Puente in the traditional reference works, except for a book review that mentions him. Luckily, Gale's free biographical collection on the Hispanic Heritage site, includes a good biography of him, and dozens of other contemporary artists of Hispanic origin who are popular but too young or too "pop" to make the traditional encyclopedias and dictionaries.

The late stage and screen actor Raúl Julia would also have deserved an entry in one of the reference works, but he has merely a passing mention in two journal articles.

Language and Literature

There is a good monolingual Spanish dictionary, a synonym and antonym dictionary, and three bilingual dictionaries (English, French and German) to translate words to and from Spanish. These are not searched in the basic or advanced search mode, requiring a special search template. This is not necessarily a good idea as often a dictionary entry could be the best source to answer a ready-reference question. This was especially true when none of the other reference works found one my colorful test words, 'el hazmerreir' — which is the equivalent of "he whomakesmelaugh" and was well-defined by the English-Spanish dictionary as "laughing stock."

Most of my test words had good definitions and/or matching meanings, except for regionalisms, such as verdes (for dollars in Cuba), yanniqueque (a staple in the Dominican Republic, not identical to johnnycake, but really equivalent to the Hungarian lángos), and maría (the taximeter in Costa Rica where the first sentence you learn is "Ponga la maría," to encourage the cab driver to turn on the taximeter).

There are no etymological notes, let alone an etymology dictionary, and while the origin of verdes (greens) for dollars is obvious, none of the cab drivers could tell me why the taximeter is called maría. I am just guessing that it is because it is located where small religious objects and icons, including the little statue or portrait of the Virgin Mary, are usually placed on dashboards.

The dictionaries also did not have the correct meaning for soda, which in Costa Rica means the hole-in-the-wall food shack where you grab a bite and eat standing at a counter. But even with these limitations I had a better hit rate with Consulta than with many of the bilingual dictionaries on the Web.

Consulta, or more precisely its English-Spanish and Spanish-English dictionaries, was the best for computer technology words like browser and search engine. Other dictionaries (and the PASCAL database) often translate word-by-word, like "motor de investigacion," which does not have literary warrant, or "motor de busqueda" which is somewhat better, but not as good as buscador.

Consulta not only correctly identifies chicha as both a liquor and a meat, but also shows the word's use in two sayings. Among the few misses are some American idioms. For example, there was nothing about couch potato, even though teleadicto, or sometimes tele-adicto, is commonly used for this term.

Unfortunately, only the header words are searched, and you must enter the word for each dictionary. This should be changed so that the query text is only entered once and check boxes could be used to search in multiple dictionaries.

Literature, especially Spanish-language literature and authors, are probably the surest bet to yield perfect results in Consulta. This is no surprise if you consider that South American novels, like those of the Colombian Márquez, the Chilean Isabel Allende, the Cuban Alejo Carpentier and the Peruvian Maria Vargas Llosa, are the foreign language ones that make it to the best-seller lists in the U.S. (after they are translated). You can bet the farm that the first volume of Márquez's autobiography, Vivír para contarla, published last fall in Spanish and the English-language version is slated for publication later this year, will be on many of the best-seller lists the day it hits the shelves. It is telling about the currency of Consulta that two of the reference works already mention the book.

You get not only informative biographies with photographs of authors and reviews of their works from a large variety of traditional reference sources, but also full-text reviews of individual works from magazines and essays about related authors that literally put the targeted author in context.

The search for Isabel Allende also retrieved interesting archive documents like the warrant issued by the Spanish court to arrest Pinochet in London, the amici curiae in the extradition case of Pinochet, and Pinochet's own letter to the people of Chile. Although few would believe the general's claim that he never sought power, let alone be moved by his closing sentence about his love of the country and promise of repeating "Viva Chile" a thousand and one times, the fact that Consulta offers information from both sides of a case, and multiple reviews about a book or a movie is a very valuable feature.

Science, Medicine & Technology

For science, medicine and technology there are the Enciclopedia de Ciencia y Técnica, Manual de Ciencia y Técnica, Historia Natural, Nuevo Diccionario de Astronomía, Atlas Visual de las Ciencias, El Mundo de la Ecología, Manual Merck de Información Médica para el Hogar, Diccionario de Medicinas Alternativas (this is the Spanish equivalent of the Encyclopedia of Alternative Medicine by Gale), Enciclopedia Médica Familiar, the Manual de Enfermería and Exploraciones y Descubrimientos, the volume about explorations and discoveries. Some of these have excellent illustrations. There are many geography reference works, with strong emphasis on geology and they beg for illustrations.

The results of the searches for DVD, endangered species, toxoplasma/toxoplasmosis, alternative energy and sciatica indicate the impressive variety of resources in this category. The outline and excerpt of the article from the Diccionario de Medicinas Alternatívas may provide a hint of the depth and structure of the information presented, and why dictionary is a misnomer for a collection of such in-depth articles.

The Guías Visuales series has the content of the printed volumes for minerals and rocks, plants, invertebrates and fish, amphibians and reptiles, and birds and mammals, and they feature excellent quality images.

Social Sciences and Business

These fields may not have as many traditional and large reference resources in Consulta as the others, but the general encyclopedias and dictionaries, and many of the ones discussed under the section on humanities, have articles about social science issues and social scientists. Education and psychology are well-covered by the Enciclopedia General de Educación, Enciclopedia de Psicopedagogía and Enciclopedia de Psicología, which incorporates the much smaller Diccionario de Psicología.

This incorporation may be the culprit of the somewhat confusing fact that articles with the same, or almost the same, titles appear from the two latter sources, but are attributed only to the former, as if it had a short article titled "La Depresión" and a much longer one titled "Depresión." I speculate that the short one is an entry incorporated from the dictionary into the encyclopedia. There is no dictionary or encyclopedia dedicated to sociology.

Businesses, especially small and medium ones, are well-served by the relatively small works focusing primarily on practical aspects of running businesses, and by the two large encyclopedias about management and auditing respectively.

Software

The software provides the essential search features (except for exact phrase searching), but it needs improvements to bring the best out of this large collection. The software offers basic and advanced search modes, as well as special search modes for the timeline, picture gallery, biographies and dictionaries, on the start page. However, this approach may be misleading.

Search Templates

At first I had the impression that only timeline, illustrations, biographies and dictionaries are available in the collection. In reality, these refer only to the special search templates to focus the search through custom search cells on the templates. It should be made clear for the user by changing the naming to allude to this.

The biographical search template, for example, allows searching by name, gender, activity (profession or avocation), nationality, dates and places of birth and death. There are pull-down menus to choose the profession and the countries, which is a very useful feature.

The timeline search template allows full-text searching and/or date-range searching for events, such as coups d'etats between 1950 and 2003. The gallery search template offers searching of the header and footer captions of illustrations. Unfortunately, the headers and footers are always the same, passing up a good opportunity for more sophisticated searches for illustrations by, say, location (country, city) or date of a painting.

The advanced search template searches only the reference titles, but this is not obvious. It would be very useful to use the same filters for the journals and perhaps even the archive documents. You may want to search journal articles with the specified word(s) in the title of the article, or in the name of the journal to increase the precision and relevance of the search, or retrieve articles only from selected journals covered by Consulta.

The advanced template also does not offer pull-down lists for the reference works. This is a bad idea. Users may not have the faintest idea about the multitude of reference works in Consulta, so it would serve as a good PR tool as well. Furthermore, user may not know how easily they can limit searches. Limits allow a search on, for example, depression to retrieve only articles from encyclopedias and dictionaries that include the word psicología, and avoid irrelevant ones about depression in physics, economics and geography.

Phrase Searching

Given the full-text nature of Consulta, it is a problem that one cannot reliably do exact phrase searches, let alone proximity searches. Oddly, the help file explicitly claims that there is no phrase searching, using the example that "El siglo de las luces" yields the same result as El siglo de las luces (literally "the century of the lights," but symbolically the 18th century (the Enlightenment era), and the title of Alejo Carpentier's novel). Well, this example of the help file is anything but enlightening. The query without the quotes yields 2,973 items. The query with the quotes yields zero.

While I can only guess that it yields zero because prepositions like el, las and del are not indexed, therefore there is no exact string to match the query, there is a big difference between the two modes of searching. Although it cannot be called exact phrase searching if there are no prepositions in the query, using the quotes is certainly useful to reduce irrelevant items form the results.

Searching for Antonio Banderas without the quotes finds 163 articles, whereas the search "Antonio Banderas" yields 26 articles. The search without quotes brings up far more articles that have nothing to do with the actor, but that include bandera or banderas —meaning among other things flag(s) — and San Antonio or anyone with the first or middle name, or even those that have no "Antonio" in the article.

True, the software floats one biographical entry about the actor to the very top, but it blindly gives preference in its result ranking to items where one of the search terms occurs in the title or appear often in the text. These irrelevant items push down the relevant ones that are likely lost to the user. In a smaller result list retrieved with the query in between quotes, the same crowding happens to a much lesser extent, making it easier to glance through the result set.

Relevance Ranking

As for the relevance ranking algorithm, it is clearly wrong when the search "Juan Domingo Perón" finds 47 matches and ranks a short biography that matches only the "Juan Domingo" part much higher (no. 17) than the last listed article that specifically mentions Juan Domingo Perón in the section called "Perón and the special laws." The algorithm can be fine tuned quickly and easily by the software developers.

It is more time-consuming, but highly recommended, to establish cross links from one article to others whenever the article has a word or term that is a main entry heading in another article. Such links would motivate users to read related articles and to learn about and explore other resources in the collection. First of all, the links in the Merck volume must be corrected, as in all my tests they produced error messages when clicked.

Other Software Features

Highlighting matching terms in the articles is well-done, and truncation is possible not only at the end of the words and inside the words (which is better to be called masking or wildcarding), but also at the beginning of the term, a rather uncommon but useful feature. In the dictionary section, the equivalent options are to choose via radio buttons to search the string as an exact term, the beginning of terms or part of terms. This allows users to find, for example, all the header words in the dictionary that end in "-ismo" and spot interesting terms, such as adamismo or adanismo from the name of Adam (also spelled Adan). This not only offset this linguaphile's disappointment that there was no cross reference to nudismo, but the search regaled me with two new words as the first definition of adanismo: "for starting an activity as it had not done before by anybody else."

Of course, I also wanted to look up articles that use this word and wondered if the derivative of adamismo is adamita, then the female follower should be called evita, but if so then. . . .

I suddenly realized that I had to stop playing with (make that "reviewing") Consulta when I got kicked-out for system time-out with the error message that called me an idiot. Not as if I were a cry-baby (which must be searched with the hyphen to find the Spanish equivalent llorón), but I wish it had called me bobo, tonto, lelo or one of the other somewhat nicer synonyms which, of course, are readily available in Consulta.