Péter's Digital Reference Shelf
April 2003

Title: Hutchinson Encyclopedia (Concise edition)
URL: Tiscali
Publisher: http://www.tiscali.co.uk/reference/encyclopaedia/
Cost: Free
Tested: March 20-24, 2003

I was wondering what I should put in the title of this review. My informal survey of nearly 50 librarians showed that none of them knew about Tiscali (nor did I before this) — a telecommunications giant in Europe. The Hutchinson brand name fared much better. And although the service is called Tiscali Reference and the term Hutchinson Encyclopedia appears only in the result list, I decided to follow my practice and use the well-known brand name in the title and to give credit to the publisher in the metadata and in the review itself.

Tiscali, an Italian company, came to the telecommunications market with a vengeance in the late 1990s. It bought out (or acquired shares in) many European telecom companies and established a strong presence in the market across the continent and, interestingly, in South Africa. A map of the company's presence shows its penetration. The 7.3-million memberships is impressive, considering the total population and Internet-user population in those countries.

The Content

Tiscali licenses and makes freely available a concise version of the Hutchinson Encyclopedia from the Helicon publishing house. Surprising as it may be, the title is spelled "encyclopedia" on the cover of the print edition rather than "encyclopaedia," which is the spelling in the URL and on some of the templates, some of the time. Go figure. Normally I wouldn't dwell on this if it were not characteristic of the entire software.

Although the Encyclopedia is not identified anywhere on the Tiscali Web site as a concise version, my tests indicate that it is. Quite atypically, Helicon's own site clearly defines the five digital editions available for licensing. Searching for the terms used in the Helicon examples, the Tiscali version is closest to the digital edition that features around 18,000 medium length articles (about 1.5 million words) and 3,000 images.

Although this edition is smaller than most of the respected single-volume encyclopedias, like Britannica Concise or Oxford World Encyclopedia, its text content is excellent and its superb illustrations are rivaled only by those of the Concise Encarta Encyclopedia. Furthermore, it provided very well-written, accurate and mostly current articles to the battery of my usual test questions, and even provided additional information and illustrations not available in the competing encyclopedias.

However, at first it did not seem to be providing very many articles at all. As I found out, this was caused by odd limitations and very sloppy software. For example, the test query "endangered species" only retrieved 10 articles and did not include even the most well-known species, such as the orangutan. The reason for the limited number of articles seems to be because the number of results are limited to 10 for any query. This is a bad idea and gives a bad impression about the scope and coverage of the Encyclopedia. It may be a managerial decision, but a better alternative should be found. At the very least, users should be alerted to this limitation and the title of all the matching articles should be listed.

In actuality, there are many excellent articles not only about the orangutan, but also about many other endangered species — such as the aye-aye, the cassowary and the insectivore species — and they all mention the endangered or seriously endangered status of the species. The summary article about the endangered species in Hutchinson is, by the way, somewhat more informative than the one in Britannica Concise.

Equally disappointing were the results for my first query "seven wonders of the world." It yielded only four articles: a summary article, one article about the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus, and two about the temple of Artemis at Ephesus. This pathetic result cannot even be explained by the implied limit of 10 results. Once again, it is not the Encyclopedia that is at fault, but the software.

There are articles for each of the Seven Wonders of the World, in addition to the summary article. The five Wonders that were missed by the search software — the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, the statue of Zeus at Olympia, the Egyptian pyramids, the Colossus of Rhodes and the lighthouse at Alexandria — are each described in their own articles. The software should have retrieved articles for at least four of the five because they include the exact string "seven wonders of the world." The last one, in an entry about Alexandria, refers to the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, which understandably does not exactly match the phrase query. The shorter query "seven wonders" would have retrieved it.

Given the software limitations, it was not surprising to retrieve only 10 personalities for the query "Hungarian-born." However, even when looking up names from my test list one by one, I could not find articles about famous Hungarians like Ormándy, Szilárd, Balogh, Hertz, Szász, Soros and Andy Grove (CEO of Intel), nor even for many Hungarian-born Nobel laureates, like Oláh, Békésy, Hevesy, Polányi and Wigner — all who typically appear in other single volume encyclopedias.

The test for famous persons who died in 2002 reconfirmed the lack of comprehensiveness in the biographies. Former presidents Belaguer and Banzer, literary Nobel laureate Camilo Cela, Chaim Potok and director Billy Wilder did not have entries of their own. Additionally, of the biographies of persons who died in 2002 and that are in the Encyclopedia, like Cyrus Vance and Thor Heyerdahl, none of the entries have been updated with death dates. Apparently, the online version was made from the edition published at the end of 2001 and has not been updated since. This is confirmed by the fact that the official introduction of the euro is mentioned in future tense and that East Timor is not referred to as an independent country.

Fortunately, the selection of biographies and their currency were the only evaluation criteria where the encyclopedia content was somewhat disappointing. Contrary to that, the country profiles are outstanding. They are detailed and very well organized. Looking up the entry for Eritrea in Hutchinson and in Britannica clearly illustrates this and is very representative of country profiles as a whole.

Finally, throughout the testing, it was obvious that the Hutchinson Encyclopedia contains high-quality illustrations. Whether it was the superb quality reproduction of Dürer's self portrait, the perfect drawing of an endangered animal, the monkey puzzle, the South American turtle or the matamata — both of them with an illuminating caption — the black-and-white portrait of Lorenzo de Medici, the colorful pictures of picturesque Monaco or the series of diagrams about cloning, they all contributed to the articles in which they appeared. It is quite exceptional when the quality of the reproduction of a painting is poor or the legend of a diagram hard to read. In this latter case, putting the caption under the picture instead of wrapping around it would make the illustration perfect.

The Software

The software goes out of its way to disorient and discourage users from exploring the excellent content. I have already mentioned some of the idiosyncrasies of the software, but I am not yet done.

The query cell with the radio buttons to indicate search options for no apparent reason accommodates only the last 12 characters. For most of my queries it was very distracting as the query scrolled out of the template cell. Also, all of the radio button are inactive on one of the two query templates. On the other template there are no hints whatsoever about the search syntax. If you type in two words, how will it be interpreted? As a phrase? As an AND operation? As an OR operation? After a little poking around you find that a space means OR.

Defaulting to OR is a bad idea with software that apparently does not use any reasonable relevance ranking. Users will be more than puzzled as to why the query "New England" returns 10 articles that have absolutely nothing to do with that region of the United States. Putting quotes around the term yields better results, but the articles about Vermont, Rhode Island and Massachusetts are still not among the 10 hits, which is, remember, the limit for every search.

Searching for the Seven Wonders of the World without quotation marks, likewise offers some puzzling "hits" in the result list: articles about Sweden, Hans Christian Andersen, Frederick II (who was called Wonder of the World), North Lincolnshire (where the Golden Wonder food processing plant is located) and the biography of Spike Lee, who made a film with Stevie Wonder. Is this a wonderful world? I don't think so.

To make matters worse, the unstoppable automatic truncation adds insult to injury. It is particularly baffling when the search for "Durer" (without the umlaut, as with every decent search software) yields an incredibly irrelevant hit list due to truncation. It shows nine country profiles and an article about World War II. Aren't there any articles that would at least mention Dürer? Actually there are several, but you have to search for them as "Drer". Why this inanity? It seems that the programmers decided to drop vowels and consonants that have those funky diacritical marks. Is this intuitive? I don't think so. I did, however, master the trick when I was formulating queries during my search tests for famous Hungarians.

Beyond that, however, time and again I had to remind myself that Cézanne needs to be searched for as Czanne and Kemal Atatürk as Atatrk in order to retrieve the excellent articles about them. I gave up on searching by name for the butcher of Belgrade, who appears as Miloevi because of the inability to handle characters with diacritical marks, and for São Tomé and Príncipe for obvious reasons once you look at those articles.

For countries where Tiscali is operating, this solution of dropping every accented character may not be embraced by users. Maybe that is the reason Portugal is not yet on Tiscali's map. Perhaps they will wait until diacritical marks, which appear abundantly in Portugese names, are not swallowed by the software. Additionally, every user, regardless of cultural heritage, will be happy if the hyphen in a period range, like 1876-1913, is not dropped. The result is a number like 18761913, which looks like an ill-formed ISSN to a librarian or some government id to an end-user.

Finally, if you believe that the Advanced Search option offers something useful, you are wrong. It is not an advanced search, but rather an extended search. And it only extends the search to the Web so that you can enjoy the paid (OK, sponsored) listings dumped on you by Overture. If you like watching TV commercials, this may be attractive to you, otherwise it is likely to be annoying.

The Hutchinson Encyclopedia has much valuable content, but Tiscali should hire programmers who can make that content accessible.